Former US astronaut. He flew on the Atlantis space shuttle mission in May 1997 that docked with the Russian space station Mir and the Atlantis mission in September 2000 to prepare the International Space Station for its first resident crew. He was then a member of the seventh resident crew from 25 April to 27 October 2003, becoming the first US flight engineer on a Soyuz spacecraft and the first US astronaut to travel both ways to the ISS on that spacecraft. Lu was selected as an astronaut in 1994 and retired from NASA in 2007.