The Boeing Starliner has been, in technical terms, a bit of a clusterfuck. Its development was hamstrung by Boeing’s greed, and now the spaceship is stuck on the International Space Station unable to transport its astronauts home. The ship is now scheduled to undock and head home later this week, but a new issue has cropped up since that announcement: The Starliner is haunted by unexplained noises.
Ars Technica has audio captured by astronaut Butch Wilmore aboard the Starliner, where a repeating “ping” can be clearly heard coming from the module’s speakers. Neither Wilmore nor the ground crew had an explanation for the noise:
Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. “Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. “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. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. “Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out.”
So far, the noise hasn’t appeared to be any major issue, but it’s just another thing in the litany of problems the Starliner has faced. Somehow, a company run by Elon Musk is our best shot at actual, viable space travel for now. That’s damning, Boeing.
You can tell we truly live in the future, because conversations like this sound exactly like the calls you get when a friend buys a crappy car against your advice and starts asking you for help with every issue. They’ll give you a call, put the speaker up to the engine, play you some horrible noise, and ask you for a diagnosis right there — only in 2024 could we have shitboxes in space.
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