Any published work yet?

A distant cousin of the Gemini Launch Vehicle, Titan IV was operated by the Air Force until 2005--explicitly to do what the DoD didn't trust Shuttle to do. In the short term, however, NASA still had the contracted launch of the first Lacrosse to fulfill...

Long-term, the loss of OV-099 in 1986 meant that the DoD would never again be willing to risk their payloads (or payload specialists) for hardware that could easily be launched without crew. Their solution was to resurrect the old workhorse of America's ICBM fleet, Titan, as Titan IV.

SLC-6 at Vandenberg AFB (now SFB) would have become the dedicated launch site for OV-103 Discovery as the USAF's "blue shuttle" (a reference to the Air Force's signature color--a new paint job would have been thermally impractical).

The loss of Challenger, though, forced a reconsideration.

Already under development in the late 70s, when military was seen as a primary future customer for STS launches, Lacrosse was one of the payloads that helped dictate the Shuttle's payload and crossrange requirements.

Each Lacrosse satellite itself cost about *half* as much as a Shuttle orbiter.

Lockheed Martin's Lacrosse / Onyx was a classified "side-looking" radar imaging system. Placed in highly inclined orbits between 57 and 68 degrees, the constellation of 5 provided ground coverage of nearly the entire inhabited globe--and, vitally, all Soviet ICBM launch sites.

The first flight from Vandenberg would have been STS-62-A ("6" for 1986, "2" for the secondary VAFB launch site, A for the first planned launch of the year from Vandenberg, under the old mission numbering scheme). The payload, codenamed Teal Ruby, was a Lacrosse radar surveillance satellite.

A while later, I knew that I was going to have an opportunity to meet Slayton, and go out to dinner with him. I gave him an 8x10 of the pic, and had him autograph one for me.
He asked me, "What was I mad about?"
I replied, "ALT-5", and he just said "Oh."

This just reminded me of one I took in 1977. It was at the presser after the final approach and landing test of the Space Shuttle (ALT-5). It was a pretty rough landing, and former astronaut Deke Slayton was the managing the project - he wasn't pleased.
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Millie was a medical researcher from Texas who devoted much of her work to medial astronautics, osteology, and oncology. Though she never flew again, she sent no less than seven experiments to orbit from 1996-2013, and was a leading researcher on spaceflight-induced osteoporosis. She died in 2021.

STS-40 was also the first mission to include three women on its crew: PS Dr. Millie Hughes-Fulford, and MSs Rhea Seddon and Tammy Jernigan.

You can see Dr. Hughes-Fulford talk about some of the mission's scientific aspects alongside a very 90s animated jellyfish here youtu.be/FvjVKAAvIn8?...