Starliner's Big Problems With Its Little Rocket Engines

THRUSTERS, those tiny, un-sexy, worker bee rocket engines that help spacecraft make little attitudinal adjustments to keep them from crashing into things, burning up or skipping off into the void. 

The wondrous six LP Time/Life Records
audio history of space exploration up to
Apollo 11.

Like baseball umpires, editors, and sanitation workers, they're pretty much taken for granted as long as they don't make a bad call, miss a glaring mistake, go on strike or, you know, FAIL.

We put men on the moon, we've sent unmanned probes to Mars, we routinely send men and women to the International Space Station and bring them back without incident, and hardly anyone -- outside the world's various space programs -- ever thinks about those little rockets used for steering ships in the right direction.

Until now.

Now NASA has a thruster problem, or more precisely its contractor, Boeing Inc., has a thruster problem, a big, unsightly one with its ambitiously named Starliner spaceship, one that's left astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stranded on the ISS. It was supposed to be a three-hour tour an eight-day mission starting June 5.

It's August, and they're still up there.

So, basically, it's Gilligan's Island in space, where Starliner plays the S.S. Minnow, and every solution that's supposed to bring Williams and Wilmore home, only seems to prolong their stay.

Professor? Professor!

Where is Roy Hinkley when we need him? The man could fix anything with just two coconut shells and a stick of bamboo. 

But that was in the 1960 back when... back when... we knew how to build thrusters?

Yeah, we did. Pretty much.

I mean, sure things sometimes went awry, like in March of 1966 when future moon walker Neil Armstrong and fellow star explorer David Scott's Gemini 8 mission was foiled by a stuck thruster that sent them tumbling, astronaut-over-tea kettle, just as they docked with an Agena target vehicle. 

Gemini 8 approaches the Agena target booster, docks,
then spins wildly out of control with a stuck thruster.
From the full-color, hard cover book accompanying the Time Life record set.

Canny retro-rocket fire stopped the pin-wheeling before they blacked out from the high Gs, but burned most of their ship's fuel forcing an immediate return home. Immediately, but more importantly, home alive and not like Major Tom.

But just before that, NASA did something really really cool -- especially considering it was only late 1965 -- and had two Gemini spaceships 7 and 6A fly in close formation over the Earth.

It all seems simple now, but back in the day, that never been done before. But they got the chance after the failure of another Agena target vehicle scuttled the original Gemini 6 mission.

The two ships -- the 7 piloted by Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, 6A by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford -- flew three orbits while maintaining fixed distances sometimes as close a single foot between spacecraft, snapping photos of each other all the while.

Schirra and Stafford even managed to circle around their colleagues before heading home, while Borman and Lovell stayed out there in their cramped little vehicle for 14 days.

Gemini 6A circles Gemini 7 high above the Earth in December, '65.
From Time/Life's To the Moon companion book.

Thrusters!

The USSR claimed to have done something similar with its Vostock III and VI in 1962, but it was really more of a 5-kilometer flyby, according to the Encyclopedia Astronautica, as the two ships were different orbital planes and lacked the ability to fly in formation.

US thrusters for the win! 

We went to the moon, and around the moon, and back, docked with Skylab and with the Soviets, ran the whole space shuttle program from start to finish, building the ISS. We had unforgettable, tragic losses along the way, but nobody got stranded out there because of bad thrusters... until now.

Gemini 6A's Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford
welcome home Gemini 7's Frank Borman and Jim Lovell.
From the Time/Life book

Somehow the knowhow of 1965 has -- at least for one aerospace company -- become the lost art of 2024, and Starliner's name is seeming ever more ironic than aspirational.

In the immortal words of legendary starship engineer Montgomery Scott, "the more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Here's to Wilmore and Williams coming home safely and soon.

-- Follow me on "Twitter," @paperboyarchive