Vietnam
Cosmonaut – Pham Tuan
Flight – Soyuz-37, 23/07/1980.
Time in space – 7d 20h 42m
Born on 14 February 1947 in the village of Quoctuan (Thai Binh Province, northern Vietnam) to a peasant family.
In March 1979 he was selected as one of the candidates for a Soviet-Vietnamese space mission under the Intercosmos programme. After training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre (Moscow Region), he was assigned to the main crew of the Soyuz-37 manned spacecraft.
On 23-31 July 1980, he went into space as a research cosmonaut together with Viktor Gorbatko (commander). The international crew was launched on Soyuz 37 and returned to Earth on Soyuz 36.
Members of the Soviet-Vietnamese short-term expedition worked at the Salyut-6 orbital station, where Leonid Popov and Valery Ryumin, members of the 4th main expedition, were stationed at the time. Pham Tuan and Viktor Gorbatko photographed the Earth, made six types of observation maps of Vietnam's natural environment, grew samples of the purest semiconductor crystals in microgravity, and conducted several medical and biological experiments.
In total, Pham Tuan spent 7 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes in space. He was the first astronaut from Vietnam and the first from Asia. He is still the only representative of his country to have been in space.
Hero of the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1973). Hero of Labour of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (1980).
Hero of the Soviet Union (1980), Order of Lenin (USSR, 1980), Medal "For Merits in Space Exploration" (Russia, 2011).
