Thomas Patten Stafford, born in 1930, American astronaut, who made four flights into space, participated in the first rendezvous with another manned craft, and commanded the first flight to dock with a spacecraft from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1975 (see Space Exploration).

Stafford was born in Weatherford, Oklahoma. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1952. Stafford served in the Air Force and flew as an interceptor pilot for five years. From 1958 until 1962, he attended and then taught at the Air Force Experimental Flight Test School at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

In 1962 Stafford was selected as an astronaut by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). His first flight was as pilot of the Gemini 6 mission in December 1965, with fellow crew member, Walter Schirra. Initially Gemini 6 was to follow an unmanned Agena rocket, then rendezvous and dock with it. The Agena never made it to orbit, postponing the Gemini 6 launch. Without a target, and since the Gemini 7 craft was nearly ready to fly, the Gemini 6 flight was postponed until after the Gemini 7 craft was launched. Eleven days later, Gemini 6 launched to meet Gemini 7 in the first rendezvous between two manned vehicles. In 1966 Stafford and Eugene Andrew Cernan flew the Gemini 9 mission.

Like Gemini 6, this mission's Agena rocket target also failed to make orbit so they used a smaller target, the Augmented Target Docking Adaptor. That device made orbit but failed to lose a protective shroud, which prevented an actual docking.

In May 1969 Stafford commanded the Apollo 10 mission with crew members Cernan and John Young. He and Cernan took the lunar module to within 16 km (10 mi) of the lunar surface in a full-scale rehearsal of a lunar landing mission.

After returning from the moon, Stafford became chief of the Astronaut Office, overseeing crew operations for the remainder of the Apollo and Skylab missions. He returned to flight status in 1973 to train for the final Apollo flight, which would rendezvous and dock with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. Stafford flew as the American commander in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975. This historic joint flight was one of the first breaks in the antagonistic and competitive relationship between both the U.S. and USSR governments and their space programs.

Stafford left NASA shortly after his last mission to take command of Edwards Air Force Base, later moving to Air Force headquarters in Washington D.C. He retired as a lieutenant general in 1979. Since then he has served on the boards of many corporations as an advisor to government agencies.