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?
X-15 Flight 91 X-15 Flight 91 was a 1963 American manned mission, and the second and final flight in the program to achieve sub-orbital spaceflight—a flight over 100 km in altitude—which was previously achieved during Flight 90 a month earlier. It was the highest flight of the X-15 program. It was the first flight of a reused spacecraft, as plane number three flew the previous sub-orbital flight on July 19. This mission was piloted by Joseph A. Walker on August 22, 1963, with the air-launch occurring from a modified Boeing B-52 Stratofortress support plane over Smith Ranch Dry Lake, Nevada, United States. Walker piloted the X-15 to an altitude of 107.96 km and remained weightless for approximately five minutes. The altitude was the highest manned flight by a spaceplane to that time and remained the record until the 1981 flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. Walker landed the X-15 about 12 minutes after it was launched, at Rogers Dry Lake, Edwards Airforce Base, in California. This was Walker's final X-15 flight.
Andrew J. Feustel Andrew Jay "Drew" Feustel ( ; born August 25, 1965) is an American geophysicist and a NASA astronaut. His first spaceflight in May 2009, STS-125, lasted just under 13 days. This was a mission with six other astronauts to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, aboard Space Shuttle "Atlantis". Feustel performed three spacewalks during the mission. Following several years working as a geophysicist, Feustel was selected as an astronaut candidate by NASA in July 2000. His second spaceflight was STS-134, which launched on May 16, 2011 and landed on June 1, 2011; that mission was the penultimate Space Shuttle flight.