Hyperdrive

Space Tourist Billionaire to Hand Out Cash While Orbiting Earth

  • Yusaku Maeza also plans to travel to the moon on SpaceX rocket
  • Pace of trips into outer space for the wealthy picking up

Yusaku Maezawa poses with a model of the SpaceX BFR rocket and the spacesuit's helmet during a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo, Japan, on Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2018.

Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
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Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who regularly gives out money on Twitter to attract followers, is planning to do the same from space.

The 46-year-old fashion magnate blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan Wednesday on a Soyuz spacecraft taking him to the International Space Station for a 12-day trip. “I feel like a kid waiting for a school trip,” Maezawa said at an earlier news conference.