The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa had a phrase that he wanted to tweet for several years: “Now, space.” Finally, he was able to do it from the International Space Station.
“The space market has a lot of potential,” he told the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo on Friday, his first press conference in Japan since he returned from space just before Christmas.
Maezawa, who heads a company called Start Today, is preparing to invest in various businesses that might be developed from current research by NASA, its Japanese equivalent JAXA, and other companies, but first he wanted to bounce back from his recent heavenly adventure: go back to the Life with gravity has been more difficult than he anticipated, he admitted.
Maezawa, 46, took off in a Russian Soyuz rocket with a Russian cosmonaut on December 8, becoming the first tourist to visit the International Space Station since 2009.
He returned to Earth following spending 12 days at the station, where he took videos of himself enjoying zero gravity, turning drops of water into bubbles and hitting a golf ball towards a flag inside the spacecraft.
The videos, which were taken by astronaut Yozo Hirano, who accompanied Maezawa, were posted on YouTube and had millions of views.
He tweeted “uchyu nau”, or “now, the space”, in the style that the Japanese often use in the popular social network to report what they are doing, such as “now, to party” or “now, to dinner.”
“This is what I really wanted to say. My first tweet from space.
The businessman is already thinking of tweeting “now, on the moon.” He has already booked a trip to orbit the Moon on Elon Musk’s company Starship, which is scheduled for the next few years, something that might even happen in early 2023.
“I don’t know exactly when I’m going to tweet that,” he said, since they won’t land on the moon. “Maybe when we return from the dark side of the Moon.”
Connect with the Voice of America! Subscribe to our channel YouTube and activate notifications, or, follow us on social networks: Facebook, Twitter e Instagram.
.
