Japanese billionaire arrives at ISS

Online fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant Yozo Hirano blasted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan earlier on Wednesday.

They docked with the Poisk module of the Russian segment of the ISS at 1340 GMT, the Russian space agency said.

A Roscosmos livefeed showed the hatch of the Soyuz MS-20 capsule open at 1611 GMT, showing Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin entering the ISS, followed by Maezawa and Hirano.

Their journey aboard the three-person Soyuz spacecraft piloted by Misurkin took just over six hours, capping a banner year that many have seen as a turning point for private space travel.

As the hatches opened, the trio floated into the orbital station where they were greeted by Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Petr Dubrov.

The station is currently home to an international crew of seven people.

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

A crowd at the launch site -- including Maezawa's family and friends -- braved freezing temperatures and cheered as the rocket blasted off into the grey sky, leaving a trail of orange flames before disappearing in the clouds.

The trio will spend 12 days on the station where the Japanese tourists will document their daily life aboard the ISS for Maezawa's popular YouTube channel.

The 46-year-old billionaire has set out 100 tasks to complete onboard, including hosting a badminton tournament.

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

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

Russia has a history of shepherding self-funded tourists to space.

In partnership with US-based company Space Adventures, Roscosmos previously took seven tourists to the ISS since 2001 -- one of them twice.