By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Korea's astronaut candidate received the green light for his planned orbital trip by the operators of the International Space Station.
The operators of the International Space Station have approved the boarding of two South Korean astronauts Ko San and Yi So-yeon, the Ministry of Science and Technology said Sunday.
Ko, a 30-year-old computer scientist, is included in the three men Primary Team together with pilots Sergey Volkov and Oleg Kononenko. In the case of an emergency, a back-up team composed of Yi and two other Russian pilots will replace them.
The ministry said that the roster was fixed at a meeting of the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel held last Friday at Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan.
Ko is scheduled to fly to the space station next April on a Russian Soyuz rocket for seven to eight days and conduct a dozen scientific research projects in the zero-gravity environment.
Ko and Yi were selected from more than 36,000 applicants last year to become Korea's first astronauts, and Ko was finally picked as the primary candidate in September. The two have been receiving spaceman training in Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, while working as the ministry's space ambassadors.
The ISS is a joint project between the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and several European countries. It has a capacity for a crew of three. Russian and American spacecrafts are shuttling between the ISS and the earth.
The station has been visited by astronauts from 14 countries, including five space tourists. The Korean government is believed to have paid around 20 billion won to send Ko to the ISS.