A screen shows Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa shortly after the landing of the Soyuz MS-20 capsule in a remote area outside Zhezkazgan in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan, at Mission Control Center in Korolyov, outside Moscow on December 20, 2021. Maezawa returned to Earth after 12 days spent on the International Space Station. Photo: AFP

A Japanese billionaire returned to Earth Monday, after 12 days spent on the International Space Station where he made videos about performing mundane tasks in space including brushing teeth and going to the bathroom. 

Online fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano parachuted onto Kazakhstan's steppe at around the expected landing time of 0313 GMT Monday, along with Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin. 

Footage from the landing site, around 150 kilometers southeast of the central Kazakhstan town of Zhezkazgan, showed the trio smiling after being helped out of the Soyuz descent module and into evacuation vehicles.

"The crew is feeling good," a commentator on NASA TV said in a statement, translating comments from Russian mission control.

Russia's defense ministry had said on Sunday that Maezawa and Hirano were set to be surprised by recovery crews with a traditional Japanese noodle dish.

Their journey marked Russia's return to space tourism after a decade-long pause.

The trio spent 12 days on the orbiting laboratory where the Japanese tourists documented their daily life aboard the ISS for Maezawa's popular YouTube channel.

Addressing his 1 million followers on YouTube, the 46-year-old billionaire explained how to brush teeth and go to the bathroom in space.

In one of the videos, he explained in detail the business of relieving oneself on the ISS.

"Peeing is very easy," he said as he demonstrated a handheld funnel astronauts use to suck their urine away.

In other videos, he showed his followers how to properly drink tea and sleep in zero gravity.

When the three space travelers arrived on the ISS on December 8, they joined a seven-team crew who were engaged in space biology and physics research.

Maezawa plans to take eight people with him on a 2023 mission around the moon, operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX.

He and his assistant are the first private Japanese citizens to visit space since journalist Toyohiro Akiyama traveled to the Mir station in 1990.

Their return from space caps a banner year that many have seen as a turning point for private space travel.

Billionaires Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson all made breakthrough commercial tourism flights in 2021, bursting into a market Russia is keen to defend.

AFP