A preauthorization is a temporary hold placed on a credit or debit card. It is not an actual charge, although it does temporarily make the hold amount unavailable until the settlement or transaction clears. Companies use preauthorizations to help secure payment.
Astronaut is the term the US uses for a person who goes into space, cosmonaut is the Russian term. The first astronaut to fly into space was Alan Shepard, who flew the Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 on a 15-minute suborbital flight on May 5, 1961. However, the first person to fly in space was Yuri Gagarin, who orbited the earth three times on April 12, 1961. Although this was 23 days before Shepard's flight, since Gagarin flew on Soviet spacecraft he was a cosmonaut, not an astronaut.
Guy Bluford became the first African American in space on Aug. 30, 1983, aboard the Challenger on NASA's eight space shuttle mission (STS-8). Guion Guy Bluford is a former NASA astronaut who was the first African-American to fly into space. He flew four shuttle missions. Bluford's class of astronauts from 1978 included two other African-Americans: Ron McNair (who later died on the space shuttle Challenger in 1986) and Fred Gregory (who after flying in space, went on to become a NASA deputy administrator.)