The thing hanging under the F-15 was not a bomb. It was a two-stage rocket seventeen feet ten inches long, and inside its nose sat an object the size of a large coffee can that weighed thirty pounds, carried no explosive of any kind, and had no engine capable of pushing it forward.

All it could do was point itself. The plan was to put it directly in the path of a satellite moving at seventeen thousand miles an hour and let physics do the rest.

On 13 September 1985 it worked, and it has never been attempted from an aircraft again.

A Coffee Can That Could Only Point

The Miniature Homing Vehicle is the reason this story is interesting, and it is worth understanding what it actually was, because it was not a missile in any sense a pilot would recognise.

It had no forward propulsion. It had fifty-six full-charge divert motors and eight half-charge end-game motors arranged around its circumference, plus four attitude-control pods at the back. Those could shove it sideways. Nothing could speed it up.

It knew nothing about its own altitude, its attitude or its range to the target. It flew pure proportional line-of-sight guidance under bang-bang control: see the hot thing, move so the hot thing stops drifting in the field of view, repeat until impact.

The seeker was a Hughes design of genuine elegance. Four strips of indium bismuth arranged in a cross, plus four more in logarithmic spirals. The vehicle was spun up to about thirty revolutions per second by the second stage, and the target’s position was read from the pattern in which its image crossed those strips. A Honeywell ring laser gyroscope kept the timing honest.

To work at all, the detector had to be cooled to around minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit with liquid helium. The dewar that supplied it was installed in the F-15 in place of the 20 mm cannon’s ammunition drum, with a second dewar in the missile itself. The cryogenic lines retracted just before spin-up. On the early two-seat test aircraft, the back seat was removed to make room for a helium tank one engineer described as about the size of the robot from Lost in Space.

El Washington Post’s George Wilson had nicknamed the thing the flying tomato can back in 1977. It stuck.

Waiting in the Officers’ Club

The first attempt was set for 4 September 1985. Pearson was in the officers’ club with General Forrest McCartney, waiting for the call.

The call came, and it was a cancellation. An injunction had been filed — by several Congressmen and the Federation of American Scientists — on the grounds that the required presidential certification had gone in fourteen days ahead of the test rather than the mandated fifteen. A federal judge later refused a second injunction, and the shot slipped nine days.

The flight plan itself had been computed by a team under Jack Anthony at Cheyenne Mountain. It was a twenty-four-hour profile worked out to the minute, and to the second on the missile release. Pearson took off three and a half hours before the moment of impact.

About two hundred miles west of Vandenberg he accelerated to Mach 1.22, pulled 3.8 g into a sixty-five-degree climb, and let go. Except he did not let go — the missile released itself, automatically, at 38,100 feet, by which point the aircraft had decelerated back through the sound barrier to Mach 0.934.

Then there was nothing to see. The intercept happened hundreds of miles above him and he had no way of knowing whether it had worked.

“That’s a Good Altitude”

So he and a friend called Scott, in the control room, had agreed a code beforehand. The version that circulates online usually stops before the best part.

Aggie-1 was Pearson’s callsign. He is a Texas A&M graduate.

The Miniature Homing Vehicle had hit Solwind at a closing speed of at least fifteen thousand miles an hour. There was no explosion because there was nothing to explode. At that velocity, a thirty-pound object does not need help.

The actual launch, filmed from a chase aircraft.

The Satellite Was Still Working

This is the part the story usually leaves out, and it is the part that mattered most at the time.

Solwind P78-1 was not space junk. It was a Ball Aerospace solar observatory launched in February 1979 and still returning data. By September 1985 two of its seven instruments were still alive, and one of them was the Naval Research Laboratory’s white-light coronagraph — an instrument solar physicists had hoped would produce the first continuous record of the sun’s corona across a full eleven-year solar cycle from above the atmosphere.

The original target was to have been a purpose-built instrumented object. Target problems caused delays, and the Pentagon wanted a shot before Congress closed the window. Solwind’s mission was deliberately extended by several weeks specifically so it could be destroyed, during which it was repeatedly left in an under-voltage condition for days at a time.

NRL physicists who came to work on 14 September were surprised to find there would be no more data.

Asked whether he would go as far as calling it a travesty, Rust did not hedge.

There is a final irony in the target selection. Solwind was the first satellite in history to discover a comet. Nine Kreutz-group sungrazers plus one other comet were eventually found in its coronagraph images — several of them decades later, by an amateur astronomer working through the archive.

Nineteen Years of Debris

NASA found out about the plan in July 1985, ran the numbers, and concluded that fragments would still be up there in the 1990s — which meant extra shielding on the space station then being designed. NASA had previously advised the Air Force how to conduct an ASAT test without creating long-lived debris. That plan had died with earlier Congressional restrictions.

The official NASA breakup record lists 285 catalogued fragments. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates another 800 to 900 pieces above ten centimetres that were never tracked. The last catalogued piece re-entered on 9 May 2004 — nearly nineteen years after the shot.

And the debris behaved strangely. It was almost invisible to optical telescopes; only two pieces were ever seen that way. NASA’s explanation was that plastics inside Solwind had vaporised on impact and condensed onto the metal fragments as soot, blackening them. Infrared telescopes showed the pieces were warm, which supported the theory. The event became a baseline case for what a hypervelocity collision actually looks like, and forced a recalibration of how debris is detected.

Three Months Later, Congress Shut It Down

The caption version of this story says Congress banned further tests “the following year”. It was faster than that.

In December 1985 — three months after the shot, in the same calendar year — Congress banned testing the system against objects in space, through the FY1986 appropriations act signed on 19 December. The timing was almost comic: the ban landed one day after the Air Force had orbited two target satellites for the next round.

Pearson’s own account of how the ban came about is worth repeating for its sheer horse-trading candour: a halt in US ASAT tests was agreed by House-Senate negotiators in return for approval of new chemical weapons production.

The ban was renewed in 1986. Two further ASM-135s were flown that year, in August and September, both aimed at stars rather than satellites so as to stay inside it. The projected cost had gone from an estimated $500 million to more than $5.3 billion, and the Reagan administration cancelled the programme in 1988, citing guidance problems, delays and cost growth. Twenty modified F-15As and up to 112 missiles had been planned, split between squadrons at McChord and Langley.

Fifteen missiles were built. Five were flown. One hit a satellite.

Scott Manley’s explanation of the intercept geometry, which is the clearest account of why this was hard.

The Patch

On 13 September 2007, twenty-two years to the day, F-15A 76-0084 sat on the ramp at Homestead Air Reserve Base in Florida with “Celestial Eagle” freshly painted on the nose. The name dates from that day, not from 1985 — there is no contemporaneous 1985 document that uses it.

The idea came from Staff Sergeant Aaron Hartley, the crew chief. The pilot who climbed in was Captain Todd Pearson of the 390th Fighter Squadron, wearing on his left shoulder the same circular patch his father had worn on the original mission.

One correction to the version doing the rounds: Doug Pearson did not spend six years leading the programme. The programme ran roughly six years, from 1979. He was an F-20 test pilot until April 1985 and directed the F-15 Anti-satellite Combined Test Force from May 1985 — about four months before he flew the mission. He retired as a major general on 1 January 2005, as commander of the Air Force Flight Test Center.

76-0084 went to storage at Davis-Monthan on 19 August 2010. What happened to it after that is not recorded in any source we could find.

Why Nobody Has Done It Since

Satellites have been destroyed since 1985. China killed Fengyun-1C in January 2007 at 865 kilometres, creating over three thousand trackable fragments and the worst debris event in the history of spaceflight. The US Navy shot down the failed satellite USA-193 with an SM-3 in February 2008, deliberately low. India destroyed Microsat-R in March 2019 at 283 kilometres, deliberately lower still. Russia destroyed Kosmos 1408 in November 2021.

Every one of those was launched from the ground or from a ship. The Solwind intercept remains the only time an aircraft has destroyed a satellite, and no pilot has fired at one since.

NASA groups Solwind and Fengyun-1C together as the two high-altitude tests whose environmental consequences shaped both international guidelines and the way every subsequent test was flown. The reason India and the United States shot low is, in a direct line, that thirty-pound coffee can and the nineteen years it took the pieces to come down.

Sources: Paul Glenshaw, “The First Space Ace”, Air & Space/Smithsonian, April 2018; Peter Grier, “The Flying Tomato Can”, Air Force Magazine, February 2009; Jonathan Eberhart, Science News, 28 September 1985; NASA Orbital Debris Program Office, History of On-Orbit Satellite Fragmentations, 16th edition; Union of Concerned Scientists, A History of Anti-Satellite Programs; USAF Air Force Flight Test Center history (DTIC); USAF official biography of Maj. Gen. W. D. Pearson Jr.; 482nd Fighter Wing public affairs.