S.Korea's first astronaut wanted to be president
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - As a child, Yi So-yeon dreamed of rising to the heights of political power. It didn't cross her mind that she would one day become the first South Korean citizen in space.
Speaking a day before her scheduled blast-off into orbit aboard the Soviet-made Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft, Yi said she was fully ready for the adventure.
"When I was a child I wanted to be president," Yi, a nanotechnology engineer, told reporters. She said, however, that as a child she often wondered about space and sometimes drew pictures of locomotive trains flying among the stars.
Originally a reserve candidate, Yi stepped into the limelight last month after Russia accused Ko San, the primary South Korean crew member, of removing sensitive documents from a training centre. Ko later apologized for his actions.
She will be traveling alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko when they take off for the International Space Station from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 17:16 pm (1116 GMT) on Tuesday.
Yi and her Russian colleagues, all in quarantine ahead of their departure, appeared calm and confident as they addressed reporters from behind a special glass screen.
"I guess first of all (after arriving at the ISS) I am going to shout: 'Wow!'", the diminutive 29-year-old told reporters at the crew's last briefing before the launch.
The South Korean government paid Russia about $25 million for the right to send the first Korean into space.
Yi will fly on an 11-day mission to replenish supplies at the ISS and swap permanent crews. One of her fellow space travelers, Volkov, is the son of Alexander Volkov, who was on the Mir space station in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Yi said watching films about men and women conducting scientific experiments in space played a role in her decision to become an astronaut.
"Right now, at the ISS, inside the Soyuz and right here, I am not a woman, I'm just a cosmonaut," she said.
She plans to take a bit of Korean culture into outer space by serving the traditional kimchi spicy cabbage and singing a song at a dinner party on April 12. She said the choice of her song was a secret.
(Editing by Maria Golovnina and Chloe Fussell)
