How to Use thruster in a Sentence

thruster

noun
  • Shep sighed and engaged the thrusters, revving the ship past light speed.
    — Sean McGowan, The New Yorker, 19 June 2024
  • Longtime and new fans alike will get a kick in the thrusters with this!
    — Jeff Spry, Space.com, 28 Jan. 2025
  • And in just 30 minutes the thrusters push the boat away from shore.
    — Megan Bush Moody, Alaska Dispatch News, 25 June 2017
  • Everything else can fail, your thrusters can go, your lights can go.
    — Bychris Morris, Fortune, 20 June 2023
  • To top it off, bow and stern thrusters ensure docking is stress-free.
    — Rachel Cormack, Robb Report, 21 May 2024
  • And the bow thrusters fore and aft might help save money on Xanax, too.
    — Ezra Dyer, Car and Driver, 13 Feb. 2020
  • At this point, the spacecraft’s thrusters will help to slow the descent.
    — Claire Cameron, Scientific American, 9 Apr. 2026
  • Then, the company will need to build the thruster that goes around the chip.
    — Perri Thaler, IEEE Spectrum, 9 Nov. 2025
  • But as the thrusters fire, tiny amounts of propellant residue have built up over time.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN Money, 14 May 2025
  • Link’s thrusters will fire to boost Swift slowly, so there’s no heavy jostling.
    — Madison E. Goldberg, PEOPLE, 28 Oct. 2025
  • To do this, the probe fires its thrusters more than a dozen times a day to stay oriented.
    — Shannon Stirone, New York Times, 10 Mar. 2020
  • One of the thrusters had been installed in the wrong direction.
    — Ben Taub, The New Yorker, 1 July 2023
  • The force of that atom flying out the thruster propels its craft forward.
    — Ben Panko, Smithsonian, 8 Aug. 2017
  • The heaters could only function if the thrusters are also switched on.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN Money, 14 May 2025
  • The Zip has a rear propeller to move it fore and aft and side thrusters.
    — Steve Banker, Forbes.com, 7 Aug. 2025
  • Finally, a thruster has to fire to put the car on the right orbital course.
    — Marcia Dunn, Houston Chronicle, 6 Feb. 2018
  • The thrusters are retractable and take about four seconds to deploy.
    — Karl Ebert, Journal Sentinel, 16 Mar. 2023
  • Early missions tried harpoons and thrusters, and had a rough time.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 8 Sep. 2023
  • Putting thrusters on the tether wasn’t even the craziest idea.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 15 Mar. 2024
  • So, to retain those benefits, thrusters need to be small but mighty.
    — Perri Thaler, IEEE Spectrum, 9 Nov. 2025
  • The second launch, two years later, was also plagued by faulty thrusters.
    — Joel Mathis, theweek, 2 Aug. 2024
  • This means the thruster forces do not have a zero torque arm and do indeed exert torques.
    — Rhett Allain, Wired, 7 Dec. 2020
  • After two months, there’s still no root cause for the thruster malfunctions.
    — Marcia Dunn, The Christian Science Monitor, 9 Aug. 2024
  • That fuel and those thrusters add to a mission’s weight, and therefore its launch costs.
    — The Economist, 10 Aug. 2019
  • The craft has only a few major thruster firings left on its way to the station.
    — Christian Davenport, Washington Post, 20 May 2022
  • With enough warning, spacecraft can use onboard thrusters to get out of the way of a piece of space junk.
    — Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics, 16 Apr. 2018
  • A lot of time and money was spent redesigning the thrusters to cure this problem.
    — David Willman, latimes.com, 5 Apr. 2017
  • The spacecraft still carried enough fuel to fire its thrusters and reach the object.
    — Loren Grush, The Verge, 27 Dec. 2018
  • The main spacecraft fired its thrusters and set a course for the asteroid Apophis.
    — David W. Brown, The New Yorker, 28 Sep. 2023
  • Our team calls this concept the air-breathing microwave plasma thruster.
    — Sven Bilén, The Conversation, 16 Dec. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'thruster.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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