By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
Beating out 36,205 competitors couldn't have been easy even for a brilliant person like Ko San, but nevertheless he managed to do so. Now he faces an even graver task of leading South Korea's fledgling space industry into a new stage.
His eight-day stay in the International Space Station next April will be the most expensive trip ever made by a Korean. A total of 26 billion won is being spent in training and sending him into space _ 3.25 billion won per night. And expectations for the 30-year-old from people will be as high as the enormous bill.
Ko seemed motivated by such pressure.
``I think I'm a very lucky person to have such wonderful people around me,'' he said in a release upon winning the ticket to space on Wednesday. ``It was the power of the people that has supported me to this day. They motivated me by standing by me and looking at what I did.''
He and Yi So-yeon, the back-up astronaut, will continue their intense training program in Russia over the next seven months. They will be trained to cope with a zero gravity environment and the rapid gravity changes during the ascent into and descent from space. In the event of an emergency landing, they will learn to survive in extreme environments such as mountain ranges, the ocean, a desert and wetlands. Learning Russian is also critical as bad communication can cost astronauts' their lives once they are in space.
A briefing on the International Space Station is scheduled at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the United States, early next year. Acquiring scientific knowledge on their space missions is necessary, too. When the countdown finally begins in March, they will move to the launching site in Kazakhstan. They will be living in a clean room for the last five days to prevent possible viral infections.
According to the plan, the team of Ko and two Russian cosmonauts, Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, will fly in a Soyuz spaceship to the space station, while Yi and two other Russians will remain on the ground as a back-up team. After completing the mission, they will return to earth in a small landing unit with four parachutes on the vast plains of Kazakhstan.
The paid astronaut project is a reflection of both Korea's ambition to become a space power and its inability to do it on its own capability.
Despite its sizable economic and political presence in the world, South Korea has made tiny footprints in space exploration while the public has shown little interest in it too. The government has sent dozens of big and small satellites into orbit since the 1990s. But no man or woman from Korea has ever reached outer space, while 34 nations, some of them rich and some of them poor, have produced a total of 462 astronauts.
The government has believed that the plan to send an astronaut into space is vital for the future of the country's space exploration and development program.
``Sending a person into space can ignite public interest in the space program, while the training received before being sent into space will be valuable experience gained,'' said the Ministry of Science and Technology.
It has also been well aware of criticisms that mocked the project as a ``space tourist'' program. To avoid the backlash, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) is commissioning 18 scientific experiments for Ko to perform during his stay.
Various government agencies and university researchers suggested the tasks. Raising plants and microorganisms are a major task, as is the zero gravity testing of the characteristics of various materials used in semiconductors and other high-tech devices. Monitoring the changes of his own body is another subject.
Since he is accustomed to conducting scientific experiments as a former Samsung researcher, Ko will have little trouble in completing his job in outer space. But more duties will be waiting for him on earth.
KARI already hired him in February. The institution wants him to serve as an ambassador for space technology for the South Korean people, especially young students.
So far, he has proven that he is the perfect person for this with his amicable personality. He also has a knack for amusing people with his writing skills, as shown in his dairies, which he made public.
For himself, the 30-year-old said that he wants to take on research about the possible use of robots and artificial intelligence in space. Whatever job he will engage in on returning to Korea, one thing is clear _ he will be the nation's most eligible bachelor.