South Korea is set to send its first citizen into space on Tuesday, when Yi So-yeon blasts off on a mission to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft.
Yi, a 29-year-old nanotechnology engineer, was originally a 'backup' candidate for the mission.
But she stepped into the limelight in March after Russia accused Ko San, the primary South Korean crew member, of removing sensitive documents from a training centre. Ko later apologised for his actions.
Yi will be travelling alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko when they take off from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1116 GMT on Tuesday.
The crew, all in quarantine ahead of their departure, appeared calm and confident on Monday as they addressed reporters from behind a special glass screen.
"I guess first of all [after arriving at the ISS], I am going to shout: 'Wow!'" the diminutive Yi said.
The South Korean government paid Russia about $25 million for the right to send the first Korean into space.
Yi will fly on an 11-day mission to replenish supplies at the ISS and swap permanent crews. One of her fellow space travellers, Volkov, is the son of Alexander Volkov, who was on the Mir space station in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed.
Yi plans to take a bit of Korean culture into outer space by serving the traditional kimchi spicy cabbage and singing a song at a dinner party on Saturday. She said the choice of song was a secret.
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18:00 23 July 2008
