One thing you never want to hear when you're an astronaut is, "There are weird sounds coming from the spacecraft." Another thing you don't want to hear, at least until it can prove otherwise, is "It's a Boeing Starliner." But since that's already happened, and since NASA has decided it can't or shouldn't try to fix malfunctions in the Starliner's thruster system, and will keep two astronauts on the International Space Station until next year rather than try to bring them back on this rickety tin can, everyone's merely hoping the Starliner can get itself back to Earth later this week—uncrewed. In the meantime it's just sitting there, docked to the ISS, possibly haunted.
This weekend, astronaut Butch Wilmore radioed Misson Control to let them know strange sounds were coming from Starliner's speakers. He held his microphone up to the speakers to capture the sound, described as "a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping." Again: Not great that it's making mysterious noises, but since it is, might as well look on the bright side that it wasn't chanting in backward Latin or somethng.
The communication between Wilmore and Houston was captured and posted on the NASA Spaceflight forums:
The Event Horizon Starliner is scheduled to decouple from the ISS on Friday and head back to Earth, assuming nothing else goes wrong. It'll be empty when it does: Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have spent nearly three months in orbit on their planned eight-day mission, will instead return on a non-Boeing spacecraft sometime in 2025. Everyone involved, from the astronauts to NASA, insists this isn't a big deal—better safe than cinders. But for all the insistence that they're not "stranded," with all due respect to these professionals at the top of their field who know infinitely more than I do about math and science and engineering and probably everything else, if you're not stranded when your abandoned spacecraft starts emitting a spooky pinging noise you've never heard it make, a few days before it leaves without you because no one trusts that it'll get you back home safely, the word "stranded" has lost meaning.
But there's good news! The noise is not a big deal, NASA says. It's just simple audio feedback and not a portal to a hell dimension at all!
A pulsing sound from a speaker in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft heard by NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore aboard the International Space Station has stopped. The feedback from the speaker was the result of an audio configuration between the space station and Starliner. The space station audio system is complex, allowing multiple spacecraft and modules to be interconnected, and it is common to experience noise and feedback. The crew is asked to contact mission control when they hear sounds originating in the comm system. The speaker feedback Wilmore reported has no technical impact to the crew, Starliner, or station operations, including Starliner’s uncrewed undocking from the station no earlier than Friday, Sept. 6.
It would be very NASA to have slipped the surly bonds of Earth, inventing and perfecting technology from our wildest imagination, pushed humanity's adventurous spirit to the furthest limits, and still not have cracked the ability to set up a home theater system without occasionally being forced to say, I dunno, it just makes that noise sometimes.
But no one's stranded! Not the astronauts, and not the vengeful space ghosts now inhabiting the Starliner, who'll be let loose on Earth in three more days—unless the Starliner malfunctions again during its descent. So I wouldn't worry too much.
