The cosmonaut Sergei Volkov is setting a new space record by boldly going where his father has gone before.

Mr Volkov, 34, will become the world's first second-generation space traveller when he takes off on a Soyuz rocket on a mission to the International Space Station next month.

He will be following in the slipstream of his father, an illustrious veteran cosmonaut whose country disappeared while he orbited the Earth in the Mir space station.

Alexander Volkov, 59, left Earth as a citizen of the Soviet Union in October 1991. When he returned in March 1992, after six months on Mir, the Soviet Union had been dissolved and he was a citizen of Russia.

Sergei Volkov will make his debut flight on April 8 in an 11-day mission to the International Space Station with his fellow Russian Oleg Kononenko and South Korea's first astronaut, Yi So Yeon, a nanotechnology engineer.

He told reporters at Star City, the cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow, that there was no family rivalry in the race to space. Alexander Volkov spent 391 days in space on three missions and was named a Hero of the Soviet Union.

“I just want to perform as well as my father, because there are things that he has done that nobody has been able to copy,” Mr Volkov said. “There are a lot of men here who trained me who were around to train my father, and sometimes, even involuntarily, they will say: 'Well, today you did better than your Dad'.

“But in spite of that, as a professional I can only hope to earn as many accolades and achieve as much as my father did.” He added that he would be happy if his own son chose to continue the family tradition to the stars.

Mr Volkov is expected to be joined in the space family tree by the British-born Richard Garriott, whose father, Owen, was a US astronaut on Skylab and space shuttle missions in the Seventies and Eighties.

Mr Garriott, an American citizen, is a videogame designer who has been named as Russia's sixth “space tourist”. He is due to fly to the International Space Station in October and is expected to return in the rocket that brings Mr Volkov back.

Mr Volkov's father went on to lead cosmonaut training for seven years until 1998, preparing crews to fly to Mir and its international successor. His fellow cosmonaut on the Soviet Union's last space adventure, Sergei Krikalyov, holds the record for spending more time in space than any other human being, with a total of 803 days 9 hours and 39 minutes.

South Korea paid $25million (£13million) to place Ms Yi on next month's mission. She replaced the first-choice candidate, Ko San, this month after Russian officials expelled him from the mission for sending a training manual home from Star City.

Ms Yi, 29, said that she planned to serve a traditional Korean dinner on the mission and to sing to her fellow crew on the space station. “I hope all the Russian guys and the American guys will love my singing,” she said.

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