South Korea’s first astronaut said Monday on the eve of her launch to the International Space Station (ISS) that she will celebrate arrival in space by singing for her fellow team members.

“We will have food on April 12 on the Day of Cosmonauts and I will sing but it’s a secret what is the song,” Yi So-yeon, 29, said at a meeting with reporters at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she was set to leave on Tuesday.

Yi, who has listed singing as one of her hobbies, said her first reaction on reaching the ISS would be to cry out: “Wow!”

She also told reporters that she hoped people in DPRK would share in the triumph of her mission, which started Tuesday when she entered space on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

A South Korean space official said that Yi’s 12-day mission would cost South Korea around US$20 million and that he hoped the flight would help further his country’s manned space flight ambitions.

An official committee headed by Anatoly Perminov, the head of the Russian space agency Roskosmos, gave official approval Monday for the mission by Yi and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko.

The three astronauts spoke to the press from behind a glass screen at the Hotel Cosmonaut in Baikonur as they were being held in physical exams for fear of being contaminated ahead of their space flight.

Russians mark Cosmonaut Day on April 12, the day Soviet hero Yury Gagarin became the first man in space, in 1961.

Yi, Volkov and Kononenko left from the same launch pad as Gagarin.

The Baikonur cosmodrome was built on the plains of Kazakhstan in Soviet times and Russia has continued to use the site under a rental deal since Kazakhstan became independent in 1991.