The Charybdis mission patch
The explorer ship Charybdis was a mid-21st century NASA exploratory shuttle.
The Charybdis was launched from Earth on July 23, 2037, under the command of Colonel Stephen Richey. The ship was Earth's third manned attempt to travel beyond the Sol system.
During the mission, telemetry was lost. The ship had moved from the Sol system to the distant Theta 116 system, where it was apparently fired upon with a weapon that caused molecular disintegration of the hull and destroyed the ship. All crew except the mission commander were lost. Colonel Richey awoke to find himself in an advanced simulation of the novel The Hotel Royale built on the surface of Theta VIII. He continued to live there for the rest of his life.
In 2365, the debris of the Charybdis was discovered in the upper atmosphere of Theta VIII by a Klingon cruiser passing by near the system. The remains of the ship were investigated by the USS Enterprise-D. A piece of the debris was beamed aboard containing the American flag and NASA logo for analysis.
Richey had conjectured in his journal that an alien lifeform had created the Hotel Royale simulation for him under the assumption that it was what Richey considered to be the ideal world, possibly as compensation for having introduced some contamination into the shuttle that had killed the rest of his crew. (TNG: "The Royale")
NASA crew
- Richey, mission commander
- Evans
- Schmitt
- Cernan
Background
- Charybdis (along with Scylla) were sea creatures in Greek mythology that lived in a cave near the Straits of Messina.
- The mission patch for Charybdis was a reuse of the mission patch for the Apollo 17 lunar mission, the last to take men to the moon. The names on the patch are for Commander Eugene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, and Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans.
- The NASA "worm" logo seen on the debris is today no longer in use, having been retired in 1992.
- Two unused okudagrams released in Star Trek: The Next Generation - The Continuing Mission provide a depiction of the Charybdis and more details of her mission. [1] [2] The ESS Charybdis was classified as an BBI-103 type ship with the gross vehicle mass of 3,500 metric tons. It was listed in the UN Registry as NAR-52. Drive type was block D gas-core fission reaction propulsion system giving the ship a net delta-vee of 7.44×103 NVP. Complete crew complement on the mission was fifteen. Richey was given the middle initial G. The ship was equipped with hibernation systems. The ship's extrasolar survey mission objectives included the survey of deep extra solar environment to distance of 100 AU, interaction of solar magnetic field at heliopause, long-duration crew habitation and USAF electric fields experiment module adaptability study in an interagency co-operation.
- According to the second okudagram, NASA lost contact with the Charybdis following the apparent failure of the ship's telemetry system on February 7, 2038. The official NASA report read: "Vehicle systems at telemetry cutoff indicated thrust abnormality. Vehicle attained 12× solar escape velocity 2.56 hours earlier than planned. Assumed vehicle was lost with consumables run out, 20% possibility of crew survival with hibernation systems at low usage mode. Follow up mission Jacob resulted in negative track."