Star of Condor was a critical velocity experiment using strontium vapor produced in a radial shaped charge. The radial shaped charge was carried to 571.11 km altitude on a Taurus-Tomahawk rocket launched from Punto Lobos, Peru, and detonated in the plane of the magnetic field lines so that all ranges of pitch angles from parallel to B to perpendicular to B were covered. Strontium has a critical velocity of 3.3 km/s, and from observation, 42.5% of the neutral Sr gas had a velocity component perpendicular to B exceeding that value. No Sr ion emissions were detected shortly afte the burst with usual TV integration times. However, about 10 min after the detonation a faint field-aligned streak was discovered with long TV integration times. We estimate the brightness as 5 R, which, combined with the streak geometry, implies an ion production of 2.4¿1019 ions. This is only 0.0036% ionization of the Sr vapor. All the ions could easily have been produced by thermal ionization from the original detonation thermal distribution. The breakup of the Sr gas into small bloblike structures may have allowed the high-energy electrons to escape before an ionization cascade could be produced. For whatever reason, the Alfv¿n mechanism proposed for space plasmas in the absence of laboratory walls did not produce an ionization cascade in the experiment.