Starliner is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station and make its uncrewed journey back to Earth in a matter of days, but it apparently still has a few new mysteries to pose to the crew before it departs. On Saturday, astronaut Butch Wilmore alerted NASA's Mission Control Center about an unexplained “strange noise” coming from a speaker on the spacecraft, which can be heard in a audio clip from the conversation shared in a NASA space flight meteorologist Rob Dale's forum (as seen by Art-Technica). It starts around the 45-second mark and plays at a steady pace. “I don't know what's doing it,” Wilmore said.
After confirming that they could hear the sound as well, once Wilmore moved his microphone closer to the speaker, the flight controller in Houston said, “It was like a pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping.” Wilmore then let it ring for about 20 more seconds before ending the call. “Just to make sure I’m on the same page, this is emanating from the Starliner speaker,” Mission Control asked, “are you not noticing anything else, any other noises, any strange configurations there?” The astronaut notes that everything else seems normal.
It’s not yet clear what caused the sound. The Boeing spacecraft has been docked to the ISS since early June, and engineers have had their hands full since then trying to get to the bottom of the problems that arose during its first crewed flight. When Starliner finally returns to Earth on Sept. 6, it will drop off its crew — Wilmore and NASA astronaut Suni Williams — on the ISS, where they will continue to work for the next few months as they await a return trip home from SpaceX in February 2025.
