Phạm Tuân

Vietnam's first astronaut and a catalyst for STEM development in post-war Southeast Asia.

Phạm Tuân (born 1947) shattered barriers as not only Vietnam's first cosmonaut but also as the first Asian in space during the 1980 Soyuz 37 mission. His journey from bombing targets during the Vietnam War to orbiting Earth symbolizes resilience and intellectual ambition.

Selected for the Intercosmos program in 1979, Tuân's space research on tropical crop growth under zero gravity laid groundwork for Vietnam's agricultural tech sector. Post-mission, he refused political appointments to instead establish VIETSTEM (1985), an NGO that has trained over 200,000 students in robotics and renewable energy. His 'Rice Terraces to Rocket Science' initiative connected hill tribe villages with satellite mapping tech, boosting crop yields by 70% in northern provinces.

Tuân's most radical contribution was negotiating with Soviet authorities to bring decommissioned MiG-21 jets to Vietnam, which engineering students repurposed into wind turbines—a project featured in National Geographic's 1998 documentary 'From Warplanes to Water Pumps'.

Despite U.S. embargoes limiting Vietnam's tech growth, Tuân leveraged his global prestige to establish partnerships with Japan's JAXA and India's ISRO. The Phạm Tuân AI Scholarship, funded by his book royalties, now supports 500 underprivileged students annually in Ho Chi Minh City.