South Korea's two astronaut candidates, who returned home from Russia after months of training, are scheduled to undergo two weeks of additional training at domestic agencies, the government said Monday.
Ko San, a male researcher at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, and Yi So-yeon, a female doctoral candidate at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science, arrived Saturday after several months of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center.
After a one-week vacation, the two will be trained by 14 different state and private agencies starting August 13 on a set of pre-selected experiments which one of them will be conducting during his or her stay in orbit, the Science Ministry said.
One of the two candidates will be selected in September as the country's first astronaut.
The experiments include several ones concerning the affects of zero-gravity environment on the human body and plants, as well as on memory chips.
The astronaut is to be sent into space in April 2008 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and spend 7-8 days in orbit at the International Space Station.
About 36,000 South Koreans applied for the astronaut program in an open nationwide competition, with six people short-listed after rigorous tests for physical fitness, reaction to a contingency, general fitness for space flight and interaction with foreign cosmonauts.
South Korea will pay more than US$20 million for the training of the candidates and the flight.