Janice R. Andrews
A NASA worker on the International Space Station (ISS) said they heard strange sounds coming from the Boeing Starliner spaceship. This spacecraft is going to leave the ISS in a few days. Butch Wilmore, an astronaut, told Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston about the strange sounds on Saturday. This caused worry right before the ship was supposed to return to Earth on its own.
Wilmore used his phone to send the sound to people on the ground while he was talking to Mission Control. Wilmore’s device sent the recorded noise, which was described as a sound that pulsed at regular intervals, so Mission Control could clearly hear it. “Butch, that one came through,” Mission Control said after the first try to hear the noise failed. What they heard was “pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping.”
Wilmore offered to play the sound again and asked the team to look into it further. “I’ll do it one more time and let you all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” he added. He made it clear that the noise seemed to be coming from a speaker inside the Starliner ship.
Ars Technica was the first to report the strange sound, citing an audio recording made by meteorologist Rob Dale in Michigan and shared with the public. Since then, Fox News Digital has asked Mission Control and Boeing for more information about where the noise is coming from, but they have not yet responded.
The Starliner is supposed to separate from the ISS without any crew members on board and try to land in the New Mexico desert using autopilot. In the beginning, NASA planned for Wilmore and Suni Williams to take the Starliner back to Earth. Their return has been pushed back to February, though, because of ongoing technical problems like engine failures and helium leaks.
Due to many delays and rising prices over the years, the Starliner program has been very hard to run. Boeing thought that this first trip with people on board would give the Starliner project a boost, since it has had a hard time getting back on track after some setbacks. NASA thought it was too risky to try a crewed return right now, even though rocket tests recently went well both in space and on the ground.
Because of these new changes, NASA and Boeing are likely to keep a close eye on the Starliner as it gets ready for its trip back to Earth without any people on board. The “strange noises” riddle has not been solved, which makes the already difficult Starliner operation even more interesting.
