Is Korea Putting the Nation’s First Astronauts or Tourists into Space?
I am wondering after reading this if Korea is really putting an astronaut or a tourist into space?:
South Korea has decided to put out an open application for the country’s first person in space, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute announced Tuesday.
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They will then go through space adaptation training at Russia’s Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center from April 2006 to March 2007.
One of the two contestants will orbit the Earth for two days aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with two other foreign astronauts, then dock at the International Space Station, 350 km above the Earth’s surface.
There they will spend seven or eight days performing pre-selected experiments, as well as ones elected via an idea contest among the young Korean public.
If the Korean government is paying the space tourism fee which I believe is around $30 million to Russia in order to put these “astronauts” into space should they still be considered astronauts or space tourists?
