By Kim Rahn
Staff Reporter
Astronaut Yi So-yeon's space life will be full of ``new things'' that no ordinary people ― to some degree, no people at all ― have ever done.
After a 50-hour flight in a Soyuz capsule, the 29-year-old will stay at the International Space Station for 10 days. Her daily life there will be totally different from that on Earth.
Food for astronauts is vacuum-packed after being sterilized with radiation and freeze-dried. Astronauts eat them after warming them or pouring water on them. Food cannot be served on plates, so they need to have foods contained in plastic bags, cans or tubes.
Yi will carry 10 types of Korean foods specially developed for astronauts by the Korea Food Research Institute and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, including steamed rice, kimchi, red pepper paste, doenjang (fermented bean) soup, green tea, red ginseng tea, instant noodles and sujeonggwa (cinnamon punch).
Astronauts cannot take a shower, as water drops float without gravity. Yi and the others will have to wipe their bodies with damp towels.
They are supposed to change their underwear once every three days, and the laundry will be put in a trash sack, which is ejected from the returning space capsule 120 kilometers above the surface of the earth so that frictional heat from the atmosphere destroys it.
Yi will have to wear a diaper for her first 48 hours in Soyuz. In the space station, astronauts use a special facility similar to a vacuum cleaner for elimination.
When sleeping, astronauts have to attach their sleeping bags to walls with belts.
Sleeping will not be comfortable due to the unusual sleeping position and endless noise from machines, so Yi has received special sleeping training.
Yi will also conduct 18 scientific experiments, including observing drosophilae, which will grow from larva to imago during her stay. She will also examine whether writing with an ink pen is possible in zero gravity.
She will also expose seeds of several Korean native orchids to space radiation. If any of the seeds mutate, they will be a new species and will be named after Yi.