About a year before I got married my great uncle sold me his car. He decided that it was time for him to quit driving and his six year old car was in excellent mechanical condition with very low mileage. The car was an Opel Kadett, a two-door sedan with a 1.2 liter inline four cylinder engine. The car was mechanically simple and very easy for owner performed maintenance. I could accomplish most needed routine maintenance with simple hand tools. Items like oil and fuel filters, spark plugs, rotor, cap, and wires were readily available. At the time General Motors was experimenting with the brand and many Buick dealers sold Opel cars and stocked their parts.

I am not a skilled mechanic, but I have some abilities. I have been collecting tools since my early teen years and at the time had a basic set of hand tools and enough skill to perform most needed tasks. There were several times, however, when I had trouble diagnosing problems and a couple of times where I missed maintenance issues. Once I failed to notice that a u-joint was loose and failing and it failed while driving on the freeway near Chicago. The car had to be towed and spent a couple of days at a gas station while the station’s mechanic ran down the necessary parts.

The most perplexing issue with the car was that it was prone to leaking water through the distributor cap when driving in rain. I eventually learned to dry out the cap and rotor and found an aerosol electric sealer that helped. There were several times, however, when I found myself trying to diagnose problems with the car while away from services.

I distinctly remember one time when I called my father from a pay phone in a small rural Montana town and asked him for advice. My car was broken and I was stranded and I was unsure of what to do. After talking to him for a while, he sadly told me that he couldn’t fix my car over the phone. I had to find someone who could come and look at the car and help me figure out a solution.

That line, “I can’t fix your car over the phone,” came to me many years later. I used it with both of our children when they were young adults and experienced mechanical problems with their cars. I loved the role of being a consultant to our children. I still treasure the phone calls when they ask my advice on a problem with a vehicle. I don’t have the answers to very many problems that occur with modern cars. Most mechanical diagnosis on modern vehicles requires a computer and a code reader. They also require a trained technician who knows how to interpret the computer codes to determine necessary repairs. I don’t do much of the maintenance on our vehicles these days. Outside of an oil change, replacing windshield wipers, and a few other minor fixes, my advice to our children is usually about who to call or where to take the vehicle for service.

Even though I can’t fix a car over the phone, and probably usually can’t fix a car if I am in the same place as the vehicle, it still feels good to me to get the call and be consulted. I hope it means that I have given good advice in the past and that I am trusted to help them find solutions to their problems. Fortunately for me, both of our children and their spouses are good at making decisions and have years of experience in solving their own problems. Most of the time these days they don’t need my advice. They just appreciate another point of view as they assess their options and choose their solutions.

I have been thinking of that line, “I can’t fix a car over the phone,” as I have read recent articles about Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. The pair are in no danger, but their visit to the International Space Station has been extended for more than a week because of issues with some of the thrusters of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that took them to the Station and was supposed to return them to the earth a week ago. After many delays, the Starliner was launched on June 5 despite there being a small leak of helium gas. Helium is used to push propellent to the thruster systems used for maneuvering in space and slowing down the ship to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. The leak was extremely small and it was determined that it would not affect the mission so the launch proceeded. During the mission further helium leaks developed. As the Starliner approached the space station, five of its 28 thrusters cut out. Four of them were restarted and the ship docked successfully with the station. The plan had been for Williams and Wilmore to make a brief visit to the station and to return to earth in eight days. Now, according to NASA the pair will remain with the seven astronauts already on board the space station until sometime in July while engineers on the earth work on solutions to the problems with their craft.

It isn’t exactly like me standing in a phone booth near a dusty gravel Montana road calling my phone, but it is a case of people with the skills to diagnose and repair problems being a long way from the vehicle that is in need of repair. The tools available to them are limited and for obvious reasons and abundance of caution is warranted. Complicating the decisions about return is that when the crew module returns to Earth it will jettison its service module to burn up in the upper atmosphere. The leaking thrusters and helium system will not return to earth with the crew and therefore can never be inspected in person by technicians who need to diagnose the problem and make necessary modifications to future launch vehicles. The delay in the return launch is in part to allow technicians to understand the problem so that malfunctioning components can be replaced on future flights of similar vehicles.

If there was an emergency, the Starliner would be used to safely return astronauts to Earth. For the time being, however, the well-provisioned space station will provide a safe place for the astronauts to stay while issues are resolved. After all it is a $4.2 billion vehicle. It should be possible to use it for reliable transportation. We’ll see if they can fix it long distance.