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Payton flew on the STS-51-C mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in January 1985 which launched from and returned to land at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. STS-51C was the first dedicated Space Shuttle Department of Defense mission. Payton traveled over 1.2 million miles in 48 Earth orbits, and logged more than 73 hours in space.

SLC-6, aka "Slick 6", was the planned shuttle launch pad at Vandenberg AFB. It was never used, but much integration work was performed in anticipation of a launch there. 

Blue Gemini was a United States Air Force (USAF) project first proposed in August 1962 for a series of seven flights of Gemini spacecraft to enable the Air Force to gain manned spaceflight experience prior to the launch of the Manned Orbital Development System, or MODS. The plan was to utilize off-the-shelf Gemini spacecraft.

The Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) is a satellite that observes the time structure of astronomical X-ray sources, named after Bruno Rossi. The RXTE has three instruments—the Proportional Counter Array, the High-Energy X-ray Timing Experiment (HEXTE), and the All Sky Monitor. The RXTE observes X-rays from black holes, neutron stars, X-ray pulsars and X-ray bursts. It was funded as part of the Explorer program, and is sometimes also called Explorer 69.
RXTE was launched from Cape Canaveral on 30 December 1995 on a Delta rocket, has an International Designator of 1995-074A and a mass of 3200 kg.

STEX will test lightweight, high performance spacecraft technologies that have been proven in the laboratory aboard an experimental satellite. The experiment helps the NRO decide if the technology under testing is right, if it can be effectively incorporated into an operational spaceflight system, and if it can be operated in space. Its experiments could provide potential improvements in spacecraft technology for both military and civil satellites.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Multispectral Thermal Imager (MTI) satellite was placed into low Earth orbit March 12 by an Orbital Sciences Taurus rocket. Liftoff occurred at 0929 UTC (01:29 PST) from pad 576-East at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. MTI is designed to spend three years in space testing new imaging technologies that might be used by future spy satellites. The 610 kg (1345 lbm) satellite carries a sophisticated telescope that collects day and night images of the Earth in 15 spectral bands ranging from the visible to long-wave infrared. If the techniques work, they could detect facilities on Earth suspected of producing nuclear or chemical weapons of mass destruction. The satellite was designed and built by a government and industry team led by Sandia National Laboratories, including the Air Force Research Laboratory, Ball Aerospace, Raytheon, and TRW.  MTI will fly in a 555 km (360 nmi) circular sun-synchronous orbit inclined at 97 degrees to earth's equator.
 

Comemmorating the X-15 Project

STIC