A long time coming

As a friend likes to say, "Make sure your tombstone has a postbox."

I sent a photo and the cover to a rare Flight Requirements Document for STS-61L  out to John Konrad in May 2013 (!) - and when I didn't hear back after "a while," I regretted the decision to send the cover .

To my surprise, a white envelope with some older stamps arrived in the mailbox the other day. As I usually write from whom the SASE  was, I glanced at the bottom corner. Seeing Konrad's name, I couldn't wait to see whether or not my stuff was being returned unsigned.

Nope. I had a nice success that day. By coincidence, I had just read the day before of someone having a success with Konrad, though with a shorter return time.

61L, scheduled for a November 1986 launch, was the latest, calendar-wise, civilian shuttle mission for which any kind of planning had been done.

Using Columbia, the flight was envisioned as a November 6 launch, landing on Flight Day 6. There would have been a crew of seven - five NASA astronauts "plus AF weatherman plus Hughes PS."

No NASA astronauts were named to the flight at the time of Challenger.

The US Air Force PS most likely would have been Fred P. Lewis Jr., a meteorologist. According to "Who's Who In Space," Lewis was part of the Weather Officer in Space Experiment which was intended to allow a trained weather officer to make visual and photographic observations of the atmosphere and ionosphere during orbit.

Lewis was one of five finalists selected for the program in October 1985. I find it strange that a military PS would fly on what is essentially a civilian mission.

Konrad was the Hughes payload specialist, and would have overseen the deployment of the Syncom IV-5 satellite. Following Challenger, most commercial satellites were banned from deploying by the space shuttle, and Konrad lost his chance to go into space.

Syncom IV-5 was deployed during STS-32R, also by Columbia. Other payloads scheduled for 61L included the GSTAR-C on a Pam DII and the Material Science Laboratory-3.

Hughes' first payload specialist, Greg Jarvis, was killed on Challenger.

Now what's the chances of getting Steve Cunningham, Konrad's backup, to sign the cover?