Lieutenant General Pham Tuan watches Amanda Nguyen fly into space.

US Ambassador Marc Knapper and Lieutenant General Pham Tuan at the meeting. Photo: US Ambassador to Vietnam/Facebook .

According to the official Facebook page of the US Embassy in Hanoi, on the evening of April 14, US Ambassador to Vietnam, Mr. Marc Knapper, held a meeting with Lieutenant General Pham Tuan, the first Vietnamese person to fly into space.

At the meeting, Mr. Marc Knapper, Lieutenant General Pham Tuan and several representatives from the Vietnam National Space Center (VNSC) watched online via a screen the moment when Ms. Amanda Nguyen became the first Vietnamese-American woman to fly into space.

More than four decades ago, Lieutenant General Pham Tuan flew into space on Soyuz 37, becoming the first Vietnamese person to go into space. Today, Amanda Nguyen, along with five other women, on the NS-31 flight of the New Shepard spacecraft, marked a new milestone.

Amanda Nguyen and the crew of New Shepard lifted off at 9:30 a.m. local time on April 14 from Blue Origin’s launch pad 1 in West Texas. This was the first all-female crewed flight in 60 years, since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew solo into space in 1963.

The moment Amanda Nguyen flew into space also coincided with the 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the US and Vietnam. “It is not only a milestone, but also a symbol of the journey the two countries have traveled and the future they are looking forward to together,” the US Embassy said in a post on its Facebook page.

The NS-31 flight lasted about 10 and a half minutes, taking passengers across the Kármán boundary, an altitude of more than 100 km considered the threshold of space. Notably, on this journey, Amanda brought 169 lotus seeds (nelumbo nucifera), symbolizing the purity and strong vitality of the Vietnamese people, which she received from VNSC.

Amanda Nguyen in space, inside the NS-31 capsule. Photo: Blue Origin.

During those 10 minutes, her capsule had 4 minutes of weightlessness as the NS-31 spacecraft flew over the boundary. At this time, she sent a greeting in Vietnamese to all the Vietnamese people: “Hello Vietnam”.

Amanda Nguyen was born in 1991 in California, graduated from Harvard University and interned at NASA.

Source: https://znews.vn/trung-tuong-pham-tuan-xem-amanda-nguyen-bay-vao-vu-tru-post1546044.html