This flight, the first of a reused spacecraft made the pilot of the mission qualified under the rules of the U.S. Air Force and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale a what?
Joseph A. Walker Joseph Albert "Joe" Walker (February 20, 1921 – June 8, 1966) flew the world's first two spaceplane flights in 1963, thereby becoming the United States' seventh man in space. Walker was a Captain in the United States Air Force, an American World War II pilot, an experimental physicist, a NASA test pilot, and a member of the U.S. Air Force Man In Space Soonest spaceflight program. His two X-15 experimental rocket aircraft flights in 1963 that exceeded the Kármán line – the altitude of 100 km , generally considered to mark the threshold of outer space – qualified him as an astronaut under the rules of the U.S. Air Force and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI).
STS-121 STS-121 was a 2006 NASA Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS) flown by Space Shuttle " Discovery". The main purposes of the mission were to test new safety and repair techniques introduced following the "Columbia" disaster of February 2003 as well as to deliver supplies, equipment and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter from Germany to the ISS.