“Uju-naut.”

I liiiiike it.

Ujunaut.
Oojoonaut.

Cool.

By the way, I’m not sure if she’s either astronaut or cosmonaut. I don’t think she’s either. When a Russian cosmonaut joins a NASA mission and goes up in a NASA vehicle, he is still referred to as a cosmonaut. In other words, the astronaut/cosmonaut distinction depends only on the traditional nomenclature of the country of his or her origin. And since Korea doesn’t have a space program yet, and hasn’t decided what they call their space people, we can’t say she’s an astronaut or cosmonaut. (Well, if Korean government has already decided what to call her, I don’t know what they picked. Maybe space girl/space boy is the official terminology they picked.)

All I’m saying. And I don’t think that makes me “biased” – as the interviewer, I was saying that she not only changed over time (the point of doing these interviews), she changed as more responsibility was placed upon her.

And she read the comments here today and wants to mention that she was really talking about recently, as in big space accidents, and that she was aware of mishaps, especially in the early years of the program.

And this becomes clear in the 3rd interview. As well as the quick letter she’s gonna write in and I’ll print up tonight from her.

Yes, with great power, great responsiblity, etc. And as she was given it, so did her knowledge grow. I just think it’s a wee unfair to have the expectations that we have for her now from a video purposely taken from well before she became “spacegirl.”

Know what I mean?

Come on Michael, you’re better than that. Given her position and what she’s about to undertake, it is completely reasonable to question the things she said. I realize you’re completely biased because of your relationship with her, but writing off valid criticism as flames makes you look silly. No one is taking unfair potshots at her or pulling netizen bullshit. I personally know squat about anyone’s space program, but even I was aware of the disaster at Nedelin.

If she were Joe or Sally Kim on the street, no one would care what she said. But she’s not. She beat out 35,000 Joe and Sally Kims to get where she is, and she gets tremendous credit and admiration for that. But she doesn’t get a free pass. Expectations are high, and regardless of whether she was repeating what she was told, there was nothing in the interview to suggest that she didn’t believe what she was told.

With great power comes great responsibility. Or something.

Also, just for the record, perhaps the subtitles don’t convey this enough, but she is using the grammar form for reported speech in a really long sentence, and in Korean, it’s very obvious that she’s reporting what THEY said to her at Soyuz, as opposed to her simply relaying all this as a set of “facts.”

I indicated this in the last part of the subbed sentence by saying “they said”, but it’s easy to miss. In Korean, it’s much more obvious. It could have been clearer if I had chosen to translate it as, “They said that…”

And the fact that she’s kinda taking the whole thing in a light-hearted tone should also make one hesitate before taking the whole thing too seriously, especially since this comes right after her talking about the smelly bathrooms and nothing having been upgraded since the days of Communism with a capital “C.”

So, if flames abeolutely HAVE to start, then at least pass some of them my way, since that could have been made clearer in the translation.

And again, before we start getting out the soapboxes, you should realize that she talks quite seriously and reverently in the 3rd episode about the many people who died in the past such that people like her can even have the opportunity to get into space so easily. And that’s after a lot more time and training. In the present video, she had just come back from zero-G fun, trying on her spacesuit in Russia, and most importantly, hadn’t yet been selected as a final candidate.

In the final episode, she’s appropriately much more sober.

Of course she was fed bullshit by the Russian (and likely Korean) space program authorities. But that’s really not an excuse for being ignorant of reality, any more than a tourist fresh off a Pyongyang tour spouting about the wonderful, luxurious lives of average North Koreans would be excused for believing the propoganda they had been fed.

She’s just giving the party line, right?

Physiologically speaking, stockier and shorter individuals who have a little bit higher blood pressure, fare much better in zero-G environments (in pressurized G-suits too), than thinner and taller people with lower blood pressure. Of course, the tradeoff is that the person has to be physically fit enough in order to handle the added demands required by being subjected to G-forces as well as be able to fit into a confined cockpit space.

Nevetheless, ultra-thin, waifish, skinny and tall types will blackout more easily (even with a G-suit on), than someone who has a little more meat on their bones, which probably makes someone like Soyeon physically more suitable for being subjected to G-forces experienced by fighter pilots, astros, etc., and is probably why her other female rivals didn’t fare as well during zero-G tests.

She’s an astronaut,

I believe she’s a “cosmonaut”.

As her comment about how the Soviet/Russian space program is safer than NASA’s, I agree — give the girl a break! As metro and wjk noted, she just returned from Russia and was still probably under their spell what with all the propraganda flung at her.

Needless to say, with our access to English-language sites, anyone can find out that in terms of sheer number of space accidents, the U.S. and Soviet Union/Russia are on par with each other, the only difference being that the U.S. has had more deaths in space vehicles b/c the Shuttle holds more people than Soyuz.

Nevertheless, Soyeon seems to be right on about how Russia’s lack of “upgrades” in Soyuz over the past 30 years has created an extremely reliable system.

Obviously, though, this has less to do with any overt concerns for safety on Russia’s part than it has to do with a multitude of problems of a social, political, technological and financial nature that have plagued the Russian space program since its inception, which she perhaps forgot to mention — or was oblivious to.

And let’s not forget the Russian penchant for human ‘error’ and the previously mentioned cover-up. Russia’s historical tendency toward ineptness and incompetence has forced the average Russian to compensate with an above average amount of physical courage and superhuman bravery in order to overcome what would be considered in the West the most routine of problems.