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Yi So-yeon
·
On April 8,
2008 Soyuz
rocket
carrying
South
Korea's
first
astronaut,
Ms Yi So-yeon,
has launched
successfully
on its
voyage to
the
International
Space
Station (ISS).
·
Yi and two
Russian
cosmonauts
blasted off
from
Kazakhstan's
Baikonur
space
centre.
·
She is
flying in a
Russian
Soyuz TMA-12
spacecraft
alongside
flight
engineer
Oleg
Kononenko,
43, and
Sergei
Volkov, 34,
the son of a
famous
Soviet
cosmonaut.
·
The launch
makes South
Korea the
ninth Asian
country to
have had an
astronaut in
space.
·
Ms Yi was
chosen from
about 36,000
applicants
for the
mission,
which is
costing
South Korea
about $20m
(£10m).
·
The first
Asian
astronaut
(or
cosmonaut)
was
Vietnam's
Pham Tuan,
who
travelled on
a Soviet
Soyuz
mission in
1980.
·
Since then,
citizens of
Mongolia,
Afghanistan,
Japan,
India,
Kazakhstan,
China and
Malaysia
have also
journeyed
into space.
·
Until 2003,
astronauts
were
sponsored
and trained
exclusively
by
governments,
either by
the
military, or
by civilian
space
agencies.
·
However,
with the
first
sub-orbital
flight of
the
privately-funded
SpaceShipOne
in 2004, a
new category
of astronaut
was created:
the
commercial
astronaut.
·
With the
rise of
space
tourism,
NASA and the
Russian
Federal
Space Agency
agreed to
use the term
"spaceflight
participant"
to
distinguish
those space
travelers
from
astronauts
on missions
coordinated
by those two
agencies.
·
The criteria
for what
constitutes
human
spaceflight
vary. The
Fédération
Aéronautique
Internationale
(FAI)
defines
spaceflight
as any
flight above
an altitude
of
100 kilometers
(62 mi).
·
However, in
the
United
States,
professional,
military,
and
commercial
astronauts
who travel
above an
altitude of
80 kilometers
(50 mi) are
awarded
astronaut
wings.
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