Here's a trivia question: What does NASA astronaut Bob Crippen have in common with Star Wars' Han Solo and Star Trek's James T. Kirk?
Obviously, there's the fact that they all command spaceships, but that would be true for any number of NASA astronauts. Nor is the answer we're looking for the fact that Crippen has the same heroic cool and charm as Kirk and Han Solo.
Rather, Crippen is unique from other NASA astronauts, but is like the two science-fiction captains, because he was involved in an incident that sounds like it would have to be science-fiction, but is true: Bob Crippen has had the spacecraft he's commanding fired at by enemy rays.
The event in question took place 28 years ago this week. Crippen was commander of the STS-41G mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger, leading a crew that also including Jon McBride, Kathy Sullivan, Sally Ride, David Leestma, Canadian Marc Garneau and Australian Paul Scully-Power.
On the sixth day of the flight, October 10, on-board equipment began malfunctioning and crewmembers were temporarily blinded. The cause was determined to be a laser fired at Challenger by the Soviet Union.
The mission, it's important to recall, occurred during the Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., eight years before the fall of the Soviet Union. The U.S. was already flying classified military payloads on the space shuttle, and astronauts involved in those missions attest that they believe those missions played an important role in giving the United States an edge in the Cold War. The U.S. was also planning the Strategic Defense Initiative, which would have used ground- and space-based systems to protect the nation from nuclear attack. The year before, President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," and the SDI program quickly became better known in the mainstream as "Star Wars."
The Soviet Union was working to keep pace with the United States, and had developed the Terra-3 laser testing facility as part of its own anti-nuclear defense program. The laser facility was developed as an anti-ballistic missile program, but proved insufficient for that task. It was, instead, pursued for its other main objective -- an anti-satellite system. The Soviet Union was concerned about the military potential the space shuttle could pose, and Soviet Premier Andropov ordered research into ways it could be neutralized, if necessary.
During STS-41G, Terra-3 was targeted at Challenger, and fired a low-power tracking laser at the spacecraft. While not powerful enough to permanently damage the vehicle, the beam did cause temporary problems for both the vehicle and crew. The incident was allegedly intended as a "warning shot" to discourage the United States in pursuing military applications of space.
The United States filed a diplomatic protest of the incident, and such a thing was never reported to have occurred again. Military use of the space shuttle continued, although after the loss of Challenger in 1986, expendable rockets were more often used to launch military payloads. The Strategic Defense Initiative, as outlined by Reagan, was never deployed, but Huntsville's Redstone Arsenal, located behind the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, continues to lead the way in high-tech missile defense systems.
The days of the Soviet Union are decades in the past, and the United States and Russia today cooperate in maintaining a permanent human presence in space aboard the International Space Station.
But if you come to the museum looking for war among the stars, you can still, thanks to a limited-edition prop made from original movie molds, have a close encounter with the face of the original Evil Empire -- Darth Vader. Who probably still wouldn't be a match for Bob Crippen.
Contributing Author: David Hitt
