On Saturday, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore reported hearing unusual noises coming from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.
“I’ve got a question about Starliner,” Wilmore radioed to Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. “There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker … I don’t know what’s making it.”
Wilmore was unsure whether the noise was due to an anomaly in the connection between the International Space Station (ISS) and the Starliner or something else. He asked flight controllers in Houston if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control responded that they were connected via a “hardline” to monitor the audio from Starliner, which has been docked to the ISS for nearly three months.
Wilmore, who was floating inside the Starliner, held his microphone up to the speaker. Shortly after, a distinctive pinging sound could be heard. “Alright Butch, that one came through,” Mission Control radioed back. “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 sonar-like sound repeated,