Soyuz spacecraft blasts toward space station (Roundup)

Apr 8, 2008, 13:56 GMT

Moscow/Baikonur - A Soyuz TMA-12 spacecraft carrying a crew that includes the first South Korean female astronaut blasted off Tuesday in a thinning orange trail to the International Space Sation (ISS).

The craft rode smoothly into an elliptical orbit after takeoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the central Asian steppe at 1116 GMT.

Live footage on Russian television from inside the cramped capsule captured smiling South Korean Yi So Yeon and Russia's first time cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko on their two-day voyage to the ISS.

Asked what her first reaction would be in outer space, Yi said she would shout 'Wow!' the news agency Itar-Tass reported from Baikonur.

During her 12-day mission, bio-engineer Yi will conduct 18 scientific experiments and has said she hoped her flight would spearhead the manned space programme in South Korea, which paid about 20 million dollars for her mission.

Yi also expressed hope that her voyage would help to unify the long-divided Korean peninsula, saying 'The two Koreas are at one, and I want the people of the North to share the triumph of my mission.'

Volkov, her commander on the mission, is the son of former cosmonaut Alexander Volkov, who on the last of three space missions, left earth from the Soviet Union to find that the communist state had collapsed by the time of his return after 1991.

Speaking to his son through a pane of glass hours before launch, Volkov advised, 'There is small wind outside so you'll be slightly rocked at the launch pad, but it's normal.'

The Baikonur Cosmodrome on the desert plains of Kazakhstan was built in Soviet times but is still used by Russia under a rental deal with Astana.

Alexei Leonov, the first person to ever conduct a space walk, was present to share a tip with the crew: 'avoid any jerks in zero- gravity ... If you feel unwell, put your head to the station's wall.'

The first woman cosmonaut Russian Valentina Tereshkova also came to wish Yi well.

After docking Thursday, Yi said she would cook Korean specialities, such as the pickled cabbage dish kimchi, for her colleagues and sing for them on the anniversary of Russian Yuri Gagarin's first space venture Saturday.

'I hope the Russian and American guys will like my singing,' she said at a news conference concluding her one-year of training at the Star City cosmonaut training centre near Moscow.

Yi and her backup Ko San were chosen from among 36,000 applicants vying to become the first South Korean in space.

But Yi only replaced Ko last month after he was scrapped from the mission for his careless handling of sensitive training handbooks at the strict former Soviet training facility.