Japanese billionaire wants to see ‘people with power and influence’ visit space

A Japanese billionaire who just returned from a 12-day trip to the International Space Station is urging people with “power and influence” to fly to space, saying the cosmic trip will enhance their worldview.

Yusaku Maezawa, 46, said at a news conference after his space voyage that he would “like as many people as possible and as many people with power and influence” to make the journey outside Earth.

“They will see Earth differently and treat it completely differently,” he said, according to Yahoo News.

Maezawa became the first space tourist to travel to the International Space Station in more than a decade. He returned from his journey on Monday aboard a Russian spacecraft with his assistant and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.

On the International Space Station, Maezawa logged video journals of his trip to space, a childhood dream. The billionaire is also planning a trip to the moon with SpaceX in 2023.

Maezawa founded a fashion business he sold to the tech company Softbank in 2019. Ahead of his Dec. 8 launch, the billionaire was seen wearing a blue flight suit with a badge reading “world peace,” according to Reuters. 

Private space travel, mostly for the wealthy and elite, really took off in 2021.

Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin both traveled to space over the summer. And in September, SpaceX sent four private citizens to orbit Earth aboard the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, wants to establish a spacefaring civilization. His company is developing the Starship rocket, designed to take humans to the moon and Mars.