South Korea will send its first cosmonaut to space in 2008 to visit the International Space Station (ISS) under a contract signed here Thursday with the Russian space agency, officials said. "The first South Korean cosmonaut will leave for the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket in April 2008," Igor Panarin, a spokesman for the Russian agency, said.
The contract was signed by the head of the Russian agency, Anatoly Perminov, and the chief of South Korea's Aerospace Research Institute, Hong-Yul Paik.
Panarin said that eight South Korean finalists were initially selected from a field of 36,000 candidates for the flight and of those eight only six had passed the first level of testing and were still in contention for the trip.
"They are in Russia and the testing is continuing," Panarin said.
The South Korean cosmonaut will be scheduled to spend around 10 days aboard the ISS and a Russian space source told AFP that the South Korean government will pay "a sum comparable to the price paid by space tourists".
Of the four space tourists who have visited the ISS so far — three Americans and one South African — each has paid approximately 20 million dollars for the trip.
Source: Agence France-Presse
