The nation has chosen an artificial intelligence engineer as its first astronaut to fly to the International Space Station next April. The man basking in the limelight is Ko San, a 30-year-old researcher at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). We hope that the KARI and the Ministry of Science and Technology will make concerted efforts to ensure success of the country's astronaut project.
Ko's planned space travel is a great honor and achievement not only for himself but also for the nation. His mission will open a new chapter in the country's space exploration history. People have high expectations that the first astronaut will carry out their long-cherished dream of space exploration. The public has shown strong interest in the astronaut selection process that started in April last year. A total of 36,206 Koreans applied to be the nation's first person to venture into space.
Through the overheated competition, two people were named as final candidate astronauts last November: Ko and Yi So-yeon, a 29-year-old female student attending a Ph.D. course in biotechnology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Ko, who previously worked at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, beat out Yi on Wednesday.
The two will continue training in South Korea and Russia. Yi will serve as a back-up astronaut who will take over in the event Ko is unable to take part in the mission. Ko is scheduled to make a trip to the International Space Station, about 300 kilometers above the earth's surface, aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He is expected to spend seven to eight days on the space station along with two Russian cosmonauts, conducting 18 different scientific experiments.
Ko will emerge as a space experiment expert after completing his mission, while South Korea will become the 11th country in the world to have carried out experiments on the space station. He is to engage in five experiments for educational purposes and 13 others for scientific purposes. The government plans to make CDs featuring his space stay and the results of the experiments. The CDs will be distributed to elementary, middle and high schools around the country.
There is no doubt that Ko will become a national symbol to usher in the country's space age and receive a hero's welcome when he returns home after successfully finishing his mission. It should not be a one-time big event or a media stunt. Instead, the nation should take advantage of the astronaut project to strengthen its space programs and promote science and technology.
We must not be too optimistic about the $20-million project. Some critics have slammed the authorities for wasting money on the big-budget event, pointing out that the worlds' rich are spending their wealth on space travel. They have claimed that such a project does not deserve scientific values, calling for more investments in basic research programs. Policymakers will have to pay heed to the criticism.
The government has ambitious aerospace research programs to develop more multipurpose satellites and devise the nation's first space launch vehicle. It also plans to open a space center in a southwestern islet next year. We hope that the first space mission will pave the way for South Korea to join the ranks of world's space powers, while becoming a breath of fresh air in the science and technology sector.