Starliner Astronauts Are Sounding the Alarm: They’re Hearing Strange Noises From an Internal Speaker

Few more things could happen to Boeing’s Starliner, the first spacecraft of its kind on a crewed space mission that will soon return to Earth without a crew. Nevertheless, it’s still making waves. In fact, like the beginning of a sci-fi movie, something started happening on Saturday that hasn’t stopped. NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed what sounded like strange noises coming from a speaker inside the spacecraft.

WT... As Ars Technica reports, the first thing Wilmore did was use common sense. “I’ve got a question about Starliner,” the NASA astronaut radioed to Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker ... I don’t know what’s making it.”

His initial inquiries were far from conclusive, and he doubted whether some oddity in the connection between the station and the ship was causing the noise or something else. So, he asked the controllers in Houston to see if they could hear the audio inside the Starliner. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via “hardline” to listen to the audio inside the Starliner (now docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months).

Sound test. At this point, Wilmore moved his microphone closer to the speaker inside the Starliner to try to reproduce the strange noise. Shortly after, he heard an audible ping, an admittedly distinctive sound. “All right, Butch, that one came through,” Mission Control radioed back from Earth. “It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.”

“I’ll do it one more time, and I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore replied. Then, that strange, seemingly sonar-like sound came again. “All right, over to you. Call us if you figure it out.”

Hypothesis. We’ve known about the situation in space since Saturday thanks to Michigan meteorologist Rob Dale, who captured a recording of Wilmore’s audio and conversation and shared it with Mission Control. Knowing the origin of the sound is another matter.

It’s still unclear what the strange and disturbing sound is. As the Starliner flies toward the ISS, it communicates via a radio frequency system with the space station. Once docked, however, there’s a direct line that transmits audio.

Similar cases. As Ars Technica explains, it’s common for astronauts to encounter an unidentified sound. It’s not frequent, but it does happen. For example, during China’s first crewed space flight in 2003, astronaut Yang Liwei heard what sounded like someone striking an iron bucket with a wooden hammer while in orbit. Apparently, small deformations in the spacecraft due to a pressure difference between its inner and outer walls caused the sound.

Therefore, the “normal” thing would be to assume that the strange sound is harmless and not like what Alien’s protagonist Ellen Ripley experienced on the spaceship Nostromo. However, given the lousy luck Boeing’s Starliner is having, Wilmore’s mood upon hearing the sound is probably not the best, especially considering the significant in-flight helium leaks and fuel failures that caused all the problems.

Image | NASA

Related | NASA Has Confirmed a 60-Year-Old Hypothesis: The Earth Has a Third Hidden Energy Field