The Nation - News from June 14, 1989

A rocket’s failure to ignite aborted a “Star Wars” experiment to test how a particle beam accelerator would work in space. The experiment at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico was postponed until next month while technicians try to determine what went wrong, said a Pentagon spokesman. The BEAR--or Beam Experiment Aboard Rocket--has been planned for more than a year and is considered a key step in the Pentagon’s research to explore futuristic weapons that could shoot powerful beams of atomic particles across space. The experiment involved the lifting into space for a few minutes of a neutral particle beam accelerator atop a small Aires rocket. The flight was to have lasted 15 minutes.