South Korean astronaut Yi So-yeon is out of the hospital after treatment for injuries she received during the rough landing of her Soyuz vehicle last month. The Korean Times reports that she still has a sore back.
“I’m still wearing a brace, and my doctor said that I must not run, yet. That’s really hard because I love running,” Yi said at a press conference on Friday. She will leave South Korea on Sunday for a mission debriefing in Moscow.
Meanwhile, the man she replaced on the flight, Ko San, denied an earlier report that he was booted from the International Space Station mission for attempting to send classified documents about the Russian space program home to Korea.
“I’m not that stupid to try to steal important documents that way. There were really subtle incidents and Russian officials later agreed they did not matter,” Ko told The Korea Times. “The replacement of astronauts was a very complicated matter because intelligence agencies were involved in it.”
Ko said he was trying to understand how Soyuz’s systems worked so he could participate in the mission safely.
“Strictly speaking, it was against regulations. But the boundary of legitimate and illegitimate was very vague in the training,” he said at the press conference. “I was allowed to ask questions and see flight manuals when I wanted to, because I had to understand the systems and I had to know how to operate the spacecraft to some degree. Even my Russian colleagues Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko understood this very well, so they requested our instructors to teach me those things.”
This may have caused problems higher up. The news weekly Sisain reports that First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov blamed space officials for letting foreigners learn too much about Russian technology.
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