They recover the medicine to save Spock, capture the Orion Captain (who orders his crew to abort the self-destruct, which would now be a pointless loss of life, and surrender) and retrieve the dilithium crystals. Writer Howard Weinstein had been a fan of space exploration following the flight of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard on Mercury-Redstone 3. _He_recalled that his first experience of Star Trek was in middle school, where he mixed elements of the show up with Lost in Space. <sep>, Pronoun: He