Vladimír Remek (*September 26, 1948, České Budějovice) is a former military pilot and the only Czechoslovak cosmonaut in space, Hero of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and Hero of the Soviet Union. He is the 87th cosmonaut of the world and the first from a different country than the Soviet Union or the USA. The European Space Agency regards him as the first European cosmonaut.
Vladimir Remek flew into space as a part of a Soviet space program Intercosmos, when the Soviet Union offered the member states of the program to send their cosmonaut to the Soviet space station. He flew to Salyut 6 space station together with a Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Gubarev on March 2, 1978 on board of Soyuz 28 spacecraft and spent 7 days, 22 hours and 17 minutes in space.
When he came back to Czechoslovakia, he served in the Czech Air Force until 1995 and at the end of his military career worked as the director of the Military Museum of Aviation and Airspace in Prague-Kbely. After that he became a sales representative of the company CZ Strakonice in Russia, worked as the Business Counsellor at the Czech Embassy in Moscow for two years and was a member of the European Parliament for the Communist Party between 2004 and 2013. From 2014 to 2018 he was the Ambassador of the Czech Republic in Russia.
