Soyuz MS-20

According to both Roscosmos and Space Adventures, the names of the crew, including the two Space Tourists, will be officially announced, in early 2021.[5] However, unofficial sources have confirmed[6] that one of the space tourist seats will be occupied by Austrian airline pilot and extreme sportswoman Johanna Maislinger.[7] For some time, it was speculated that the second seat might go to Japanese entrepreneur Satoshi Takamatsu, who was offered a seat on Soyuz TMA-18M after British singer Sarah Brightman pulled out from the mission for personal reasons, but declined due to not having enough time to fully train for Soyuz TMA-18M.[8][9] However, in November the respected online publication The Space Review revealed that a Japanese female celebrity was in line to be launched with, Aleksandr Misurkin and Johanna Maislinger [10] If this happens, it will be the first time that two women have launched together on a Soyuz.

Position	Crew member
Commander	Aleksandr Misurkin, RSA Third spaceflight
Spaceflight participant 1	Johanna Maislinger, SA First spaceflight
Spaceflight participant 2	TBA, SA First spaceflight

Soyuz MS-20 will mark the first flight of a space tourist since Canadian space tourist Guy Laliberté launched onboard Soyuz TMA-16 in September 2009.[11] British singer Sarah Brightman was originally scheduled to fly onboard Soyuz TMA-18M in 2015, although she cancelled her trip before launch.[12]

Soyuz MS-20 will mark the first of at least two completely commercially dedicated Soyuz flights flown by Roscosmos, the second being Soyuz MS-23, which is scheduled for launch in October 2022 and will also ferry one Russian cosmonaut and two commercial astronauts to the ISS for six months.[13]

This flight will also mark a departure from the traditional way space tourism has been done. On previous flights, the space tourist's mission would take place during either a "taxi" flight, where Soyuz lifeboats on the ISS were being swapped, allowing for a week or so-long mission, or during handover periods between crews, where the space tourist would launch with an incoming long-duration crew and land with the outgoing long-duration crew. Soyuz MS-20 is a departure from this model as it involves a flight entirely dedicated to space tourism. American company Axiom Space also has a deal for a similar flight with SpaceX, where an Axiom-hired professional astronaut will fly with three paying space tourists to the ISS on board a SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft, which is also scheduled for late 2021.[14] Space Adventures themselves also have a similar deal with SpaceX, although instead of going to the ISS the flight will be a free flight tourism mission orbiting at roughly twice the altitude as the ISS.[15]