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 move its astronauts home. The ship is now scheduled to undock and head home later this week, but a brand 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” may be clearly heard coming from the module’s speakers. Neither Wilmore nor the bottom crew had an evidence for the noise:
Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone as much as the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. “Alright Butch, that one got here through,” Mission control radioed as much as Wilmore. “It was type of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping.”
“I’ll do it yet another time, and I’ll let y’all scratch your heads and see when you can determine what’s occurring,” Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. “Alright, over to you. Call us when you figure it out.”
Up to now, the noise hasn’t gave the impression to be any major issue, however it’s just one other thing within the litany of problems the Starliner has faced. In some way, an organization run by Elon Musk is our greatest shot at actual, viable space travel for now. That’s damning, Boeing.
You’ll be able to tell we truly live in the long run, because conversations like this sound exactly just like the calls you get when a friend buys a crappy automobile against your advice and starts asking you for help with every issue. They’ll provide you with a call, put the speaker as much as the engine, play you some horrible noise, and ask you for a diagnosis right there — only in 2024 could we’ve shitboxes in space.
This Article First Appeared At jalopnik.com
