Yusaku Maezawa, SpaceX BFR's first private passenger, poses with a miniature rocket and space helmet prior to the start of a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo. Photo: AFP

Russia on Wednesday will send Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa to the International Space Station (ISS) in a move marking Moscow's return to the now booming space tourism business after a decade-long break.

One of Japan's richest men, Maezawa, 46, will blast off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan accompanied by his assistant Yozo Hirano. 

On Sunday morning, their Soyuz spacecraft with a Japanese flag and an "MZ" logo for Maezawa's name was moved onto the launch pad in unusually wet weather for Baikonur, an AFP journalist saw.

The mission will end a decade-long pause in Russia's space tourism program that has not accepted tourists since Canada's Cirque du Soleil co-founder Guy Laliberte in 2009.

However, in a historic first, the Russian space agency Roscosmos in October sent actress Yulia Peresild and director Klim Shipenko to the ISS to film scenes for the first movie in orbit in an effort to beat a rival Hollywood project.

Maezawa's launch comes at a challenging time for Russia as its space industry struggles to remain relevant and keep up with Western competitors in the modern space race. 

In 2020, the US company SpaceX of billionaire Elon Musk ended Russia's monopoly on manned flights to the ISS after it delivered astronauts to the orbiting laboratory in its Crew Dragon capsule.

This, however, also freed up seats on Russia's Soyuz rockets that were previously purchased by NASA allowing Moscow to accept fee-paying tourists like Maezawa. 

Their three-seat Soyuz spacecraft will be piloted by Alexander Misurkin, a 44-year-old Russian cosmonaut who has already been on two missions to the ISS.

The pair will spend 12 days aboard the space station where they plan to document their journey for Maezawa's YouTube channel with more than 750,000 subscribers.

The tycoon is the founder of Japan's largest online fashion mall and the country's 30th richest man, according to Forbes.

"I am almost crying because of my impressions, this is so impressive," Maezawa said in late November after arriving at Baikonur for the final days of preparation.

Maezawa and Hirano have spent the past few months training at Star City, a town outside Moscow that has prepared generations of Soviet and Russian cosmonauts.

AFP