Doohan

White-haired and weathered, Doohan looks every inch the lifelong, grease-stained engineer. His design borrows visual notes from film director Nicholas Ray, reinforcing the sense of an old hand who has spent decades among aircraft, shuttles, and salvage.

Terse to the point of bluntness, Doohan offers only a curt greeting and lets his work speak for him. He holds firm convictions about technology, arguing that a person ought to command a machine rather than be commanded by it, and he routinely waves off his assistant Miles and his constant pitches to modernize the shop's equipment. Beneath the gruffness sits real confidence, the sort that lets him stake a rescue on a decades-old shuttle.

Doohan built the Swordfish II and at some point handed it over to Spike, later taking on the upbeat Miles as an assistant whose upgrade suggestions he liked to dismiss. His pet project was the restoration of the old NASA shuttle Columbia, a job Miles thought hopeless. When Spike came by for repairs in 2071, a courier named Reggie arrived with a part and tried to sell a MONO computer; Doohan's suspicion about its origin, plus Spike overhearing the description, exposed it as pirate loot. After pirates ambushed Spike in orbit, Miles caught the distress traffic and alerted Doohan, who resolved to help. Firing the Columbia aloft on JATO boosters, he intercepted the crippled Swordfish in the upper atmosphere, scooped it into the cargo bay before it could burn up, and saved Spike, then crash-landed the battered shuttle back on Earth. His name is a nod to actor James Doohan, who played the Enterprise's chief engineer in Star Trek.