A Star Wars Snafu

The technology may have been flawless, but the people were not. Scientists at a U.S. Air Force ground station on a Maui mountaintop fired a laser beam 220 miles through space at a minute target, an 8-in. mirror attached to a hatch window on the left side of the space shuttle Discovery, which was speeding above the Hawaiian island at 17,500 m.p.h. The intention was to bounce the low-powered ribbon of light off the mirror and send it flashing back to Maui. But as the blue-green laser beam successfully "painted" the spacecraft over the test site, no reflection bounced back. Mission Commander Daniel Brandenstein stated the obvious: "We're not pointing at the ground."

Indeed, Discovery was turned 180 degrees in the wrong direction, with the mirror facing the darkness of space instead of the laser beam coming from earth. "We slipped up," said Flight Director Milton Heflin. Human error had ruined the first space shuttle experiment in President Reagan's $26 billion Star Wars research program last week. Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, it turned out, had given the astronauts the wrong numbers to feed into Discovery's computerized guidance system. Rather than pointing down at a 9,994-ft. mountain, the shuttle turned upward, searching for a nonexistent peak 9,994 nautical miles high.

NASA tried again two days later. This time, with the shuttle pointed in the right direction, the laser beam flashed off the mirror for more than 2 1/2 min., creating a spectacular light show for Discovery's crew as they broadcast the booming strains of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture.

Critics of Star Wars seized on the initial snafu as proof of the program's folly. Said Physicist Robert Bowman, president of the Institute for Space and Security Studies in Potomac, Md.: "The problem is in applications of an immensely complex system . . . The chances are that (it) never could be debugged."

The test was designed to see how well a laser beam can remain fixed on an object in a low orbit around the earth, despite the distorting effect of the atmosphere. Such a capability is important because Star Wars planners want to station high-powered lasers on the ground, where they could be as big as necessary and easily maintained. These lasers would shoot beams up to orbiting mirrors, which would then direct the destructive light at incoming missiles.

To aim its mirror earthward, Discovery had to fly with its nose forward and pitched downward. When it passed over the Maui facility on its 37th orbit Wednesday, the shuttle was instead flying backward with its nose pitched slightly upward. A NASA spokesman sheepishly called the mistake a "ground- based accounting error."

The shuttle's seven-member crew also successfully launched three communications satellites for various clients before this week's scheduled landing. Ironically, while Shi'ite terrorists held 40 American hostages from a hijacked airliner, one of the satellites the U.S. boosted into orbit (for a $19.2 million fee) is owned by a consortium of 21 Arab nations -- including Lebanon and Syria -- and the Palestine Liberation Organization.