Past 200!

There have been 355 astronauts who flew on the shuttle between 1981 and 2011. Of those, 36 are deceased (the crews of Mision 51L and STS-107, accounting for 14 of those people, as well as Charles Brady; Sonny Carter; Gordon Fullerton; Reinhard Furrer; Dale Gardner; David Griggs; Hank Hartsfield; Karl Heinze; Bill Lenoir; Mike Lounge; David Low; Boris Morukov; Steve Nagel; Wubbo Ockels; Bob Overmyer; Ron Parise; Alan Poindexter; Sally Ride; Lacy Veach; Janice Voss; Dave Walker; and Gennady Strekalov, who only landed in the shuttle.)

Missed her by that much!

Of those deceased, Hartsfield, Nagel and Ride have signed my copy of Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years. And until early March I had 167 of the shuttle astronauts in my book, with trying to find the remaining space travelers a difficult but not impossible task. In doing so, I have started to concentrate more on signings by mail - although in mid-February I missed one I didn't know about (see photo at left) although I was half an hour away!

But I was able to get the OK to send my book to Clayton C. Anderson, who was a speaker at Celebrate! Innovation at Des Moines Area Community College in West Des Moines, Iowa. In addition to being my No. 168 shuttle astronaut, putting me past 200 (168+33 deceased, not counting the three who signed my book=201), my book got to see Iowa for the first time.*

In addition to my "Shuttle: 20 Years" book, I also enclosed a photo which Anderson autographed with his full signature. I was very glad for this. I've seen Anderson sign with his initials, and I've also seen other astronauts through the years shorten their signature, in one instance, with just their initials.

I Tweeted Anderson, remarking about the cold spell on the East Coast of late, and this is what he replied:

I am puzzled by the Soyuz TMA-10 reference, since Anderson did not fly nor train as backup on that mission, but his Expedition 15 crewmates, Fyodor N. Yurchikhin and Oleg V. Kotov did. Why not also include Soyuz TMA-11, which brought Peggy A. Whitson and Yuri I. Malenchenko to the International Space Station on Expeditiom 16?

Now on to the remaining 154!

*Although I have 168 shuttle signers, I have 180 total signatures. Those majority of those 12 trained but did not fly or were members of Groups 8 through 19, the shuttle era, or were otherwise active astronauts duing that time period. Those 12 include Fred Haise, who flew on the Enterprise Approach-and-Landing tests; Alan Bean, who was Chief of the Astronaut Office when John Young was training for STS-1 (and Bean was widely expected to command the first Spacelab flight); backup payload specialists; prime payload specialists whose flight was canceled following Challenger; T. J. Creamer, whose only flight was on the Soyuz rocket; and Jim Lovell, who wrote the foreword of "Space Shuttle: The First 20 Years."