One of the stranded NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station has reported a ‘strange noise’ coming from Boeing’s Starliner aircraft.
Butch Wilmore contacted Johnson Space Center in Houston on Saturday to share his concerns just days before the faulty aircraft is set to undock from the ISS, unmanned, and attempt to return to Earth on autopilot.
‘I’ve got a question about Starliner. There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker and I didn’t know if you can connect into the Starliner … I don’t know what’s making it’, he said.
Mission control confirmed to Butch that they could configure a way for the sound to be played. Wilmore then held the phone up to the Starliner’s speakers.
After a failed first attempt, mission control responded: ‘Butch, that one came through. It was kind of like a pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping’.
Wilmore and fellow astronaut Suni Williams (pictured) have been marooned on the ISS since June 6 when they arrived on Boeing’s aircraft for what was supposed to be a week-long stay. But the Starliner is now set to return to Earth without them after being plagued by thruster troubles and helium leaks
Wilmore contacted Johnson Space Center in Houston about what he called a ‘strange noise’ just days before they undock from the ISS, empty, and attempt to return to earth on autopilot
Butch played the sound one more time which was successfully received by mission control.
‘I’ll let you figure it out,’ Wilmore said.
‘Good recording, thanks Butch,’ mission control replied. ‘We will pass it onto the team and let you know what we find.’
They asked one more time if there was any other noise and confirmed that it was coming from the Starliner’s speaker.
Wilmore’s call to Houston was first reported by Ars Technica, which stated that the recording was first captured and shared by Michigan-based meteorologist Rob Dale.
Wilmore and fellow astronaut Suni Williams have been marooned on the ISS since June 6 when they arrived on Boeing’s aircraft for what was supposed to be a week-long stay. But the Starliner is now set to return to Earth without them after being plagued by thruster troubles and helium leaks.
The pair are not due to return back to Earth until 2025 – when one of Elon Musk‘s SpaceX ships is scheduled to ferry them home.
In the latest audio about the problem aircraft, Wilmore tells mission control he hopes they will ‘scratch [their] heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on.’
Mission control can only tell Wilmore that they will pass the news along and report back.
Wilmore and Williams launched toward the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner three months ago.
The scandal-laden Starliner – which was built and developed using over $4 billion of taxpayer money – was beset by technical difficulties in the weeks leading up to launch, and even on the day of.
The spacecraft safely delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS, but by the time it got there, it had sprung more helium leaks and five of its 28 thrusters had failed.
In a press conference on August 24, NASA officials announced that it would be too risky to bring the astronauts home on faulty Starliner.
Instead, they will return home on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov toward the ISS on September 24, according to a NASA statement released last week.
Suni Williams (pictued) and Wilmore launched toward the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner on June 5
The scandal-laden Starliner – which was built and developed using over $4 billion of taxpayer money – had been plagued by helium leaks and thruster issues in the weeks leading up to launch, and even on the day of
That means that Wilmore and Williams will remain on the ISS until at least February 2025.
Their empty Starliner capsule is set to undock on September 6 and will attempt to return on autopilot and land in the New Mexico desert.
The decision was humiliating for Boeing, which has struggled for years to get their Starliner program off the ground only to be bailed out at the eleventh hour by their biggest competitor.
‘We have had so many embarrassments lately, we’re under a microscope. This just made it, like, 100 times worse,’ one employee anonymously told the New York Post.
‘We hate SpaceX,’ he added. ‘We talk s*** about them all the time, and now they’re bailing us out.’
At this point, it’s unclear whether Starliner will ever be able to complete a crewed mission to the ISS.
NASA is planning to decommission the ISS by 2030, giving Boeing just five years to fix Starliner’s technical issues and successfully send and return astronauts to space.
To put that in perspective, it’s already been five years since Starliner’s first failed uncrewed test flight.
But it’s possible that Boeing could retire Starliner before they even hit that deadline, as the company has already sunk $1.6 billion into the spacecraft’s development.