Criteria
The criteria for determining who has achieved human spaceflight vary. The FAI defines spaceflight as any flight over 100 kilometres (62 mi) of altitude. In the United States, professional, military, and commercial astronauts who travel above an altitude of 80 kilometres (50 mi) are eligible to purchase astronaut wings. Until 2003, professional space travelers were sponsored and trained exclusively by governments, either by the military or by civilian space agencies. However, with the first sub-orbital flight of the privately funded Scaled Composites Tier One in 2004, the commercial astronaut category was created.
Read more about this topic: Commercial Astronaut
Famous quotes containing the word criteria:
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice—however much we might desire it.”
—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation.... The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value.”
—V.N. (Valintin Nikolaevic)