Ioonos

Yi So-Yeon, the first South-Korean astronaut to go into space

On board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, the female astronaut travelled to the ISS* for a ten day mission.

A bio-engineering student specializing in nanotechnologies, Yi So-Yeon is 29 years-old. She took with her some cinnamon tea, some noodles and some Kimchi, a popular fermented dish. And so it was that on the forty-seventh anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space, she offered her five team mates (three Russians and two Americans) traditional Korean dishes, accompanied by national songs.

Her return to Earth on 19 April was slightly hair-raising in that the spacecraft landed 420 km west of the planned area and all of the passengers were subjected to exceptionally high gravitational forces. An enquiry has been opened to clarify why the target landing area was not reached.