By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
South Korea's first astronaut who will fly to the International Space Station early next year will be named Wednesday from two candidates, Ko San and Yi So-yeon.
The Ministry of Science and Technology said that a seven-person committee will pick one name this morning after assessing the scores from their six-month training program in Russia.
Ko and Yi, both with outstanding intellectual and physical abilities, were selected from more than 36,000 applicants last year through a series of rigorous tests and a TV popularity poll. They have been receiving spaceman trainings in Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow since January.
The ministry said the result will be announced around 10 a.m.
``We have already received the training results from the Russian space agency, but it will not be opened to the committee until tomorrow morning,'' a ministry official said.
Whoever is selected, both will continue their training shuttling between Russia and South Korea. The back-up astronaut will take over if the first choice is unable to participate in the planned mission. They left for Russia on August 26.
The winner is scheduled to fly to the International Space Station, about 300 kilometers above the earth's surface, in April 2008 aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He or she will spend about 10 days conducting various scientific experiments on the earth orbit.
Coming back to the earth, they will continue working as the ambassadors of South Korea's space programs.
Ko, 30, and Yi, 29, have proved to have outstanding athletic and scholastic talents.
Ko is a researcher at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, majoring in the artificial intelligence. He won a bronze medal in the national boxing competition in 2004, and had served as a member of the Seoul National University mountaineering team.
Yi is in a Ph.D. course in biotechnology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She is an advanced practitioner of taekwondo.
It is reported that Ko has been slightly beating Yi in training grades.
According to Ko's diary opened to the public last month, he has impressed the Russian tutors by setting a new record in the sea evacuation training. On the contrary, Yi has some trouble with seasick and had to vomit several times.
``After the astronaut project, I want to continue to live a life with a dream,'' Ko said in the diary. ``And it can't be better if I can share the dream with others.''
The astronaut program is planned to be an attraction to space science and technology for Korean people, and some have played it down as a space tourist program.
The ministry is believed to be paying $21 million to the Russian space agency for the trip and the training of the astronauts.