Russian company wants tourists to take a spacewalk at ISS in 2023

A Russian company, in collaboration with an American company, wants to bring two space tourists to the International Space Station by 2023. The plan is to have one of them take a spacewalk.

A Soyuz rocket is to bring the two space tourists to the Russian segment of the ISS in 2023. From there, one of the two will make the short spacewalk accompanied by an astronaut, as is the intention of the Russian Energia Space Rocket Corporation, which has concluded a contract with the American Space Adventures for this.

It is not the first time that Energia and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, in collaboration with Space Adventures, have organized short-term commercial flights to the Russian ISS segment with a Soyuz. The parties already did this eight times before in the period from 2001 to 2009, with the Americans Dennis Tito, Greg Olsen, Charles Simoni and the British Mark Shuttleworth, known from Canonical, among others. It will be the first time that a space tourist will take a walk outside the space station.

The reason that no more space tourists went to the ISS after 2009 was due to the discontinuation of the Space Shuttle by NASA in 2011. As a result, the transport of astronauts to and from the ISS became dependent on Soyuz and there was no more room for ‘pleasure flights’. ‘. With the arrival of spacecraft from SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Boeing, that space will come again.