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Over 12 Days In Space, Here’s How Yusaku Maezawa Shared A New Perspective for Us On Earth

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It’s been over 12 years since the International Space Station welcomed a private visitor, but in December the cooperative mission opened its doors to Yusaku Maezawa. Maezawa is a Japanese billionaire who bought his ticket to spend nearly two weeks aboard ISS for an estimated $80 million; you might recognize his name from headlines a few years ago where he announced that he had purchased a trip around the moon for himself and eight others, thanks to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Maezawa’s enthusiasm for space – and seemingly endless budget to experience it – led him to book a trip to the ISS while waiting for that future lunar flight, and he spent December 8-19th aboard the station circling the globe.

Harkening back to past missions where NASA has prioritized showing a variety of space experiments and life abroad ISS (who else was hooked by Commander Chris Hadfield’s Space Oddity rendition in 2013?), Maezawa and his filmographer Yozo Hirano spent much of the 12 days shooting tons of video about all aspects of life in space – from the mundane and gross to the whimsical. Both from space and now back on earth, Maezawa has been sharing that footage to help inspire others’ interest in space too.

So here’s a recap of what Maezawa has shared from his space adventure so far. While the videos are in Japanese, YouTube auto-captions do a decent job of translating to make sense of the seriousness and silliness of each one.

One Orbit Around Earth

Within a few days of reaching the ISS, Maezawa released this video showing a timelapse of one earth orbit by the ISS. In it, you see the solar panels of the station rotating and the sun rising above a rapidly spinning earth. Given that one of Maezawa’s other early posts was about whether the earth really was round and so blue, this was a great piece of video proof.

Toilets in Space

It’s one of the first questions kids ask every astronaut: how do you take care of “business” in space? Naturally, Maezawa gave us a tour:

While it certainly gets the job done, it’s easy to imagine how nice it is for astronauts and space tourists to return home to more conventional toilet arrangements.

Maezawa also published other videos about personal hygiene from space, including one about tooth brushing, another about washing his hair, and even one about how astronauts weigh themselves in space.

Looking Home from Space

Many astronauts say that their favorite views of earth are the ones they recognize: the countries and cities they call home.

Maezawa shared similar sentiments, with several posts about Chiba, the area of Japan where he grew up, and several other parts of Japan that he spotted when soaring above them from 250km above earth.

Better than Astronaut Ice Cream

The myth that astronauts eat dehydrated food like the kind you can find sold in most space and science museums has long been debunked, but it was fun to see Maezawa share some food experiences from space.

He tries sea creature shaped snacks – which quickly drift away in the microgravity environment in ISS and require wrangling before they can be eaten (or run amok in systems onboard), makes a mess and loses a few cooking utensils during a meal demonstration, and demonstrates how to make tea for a cafe snack.

Earth Fun in Space

Part of Maezawa’s goal with the dearMoon project is to inspire artists and creators to share their experience of space and earth from space. It’s no surprise then that he shares some experiences in that realm too. He tries drumming in space (it sounds the same in space), hangs a piece of art on the ISS, discusses space fashion (function supersedes form), and challenges cosmonaut Commander Alexander Misurkin to a bit of arm wrestling to show how different sports will be in space.

Maezawa undoubtedly has lots more content to share in the future, and will likely continue distributing it through both Twitter and YouTube.

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