NEW: Stranded Astronauts Report Mysterious “Strange Noises” In Spacecraft
Two American astronauts stranded in space may be in even more trouble after they reported hearing a “strange noise” emanating from the capsule set to depart for Earth in just a few days.
Fox News reported on a conversation between NASA Mission Control and astronaut Butch Wilmore where he shares a recording of what he said sounds like pulses at regular intervals. He holds up his phone to the microphone for technicians to hear what he’s talking about. “Butch, that one came through,” Mission Control said about the faint noise. “It was kind of like a pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping.” The noise is coming from the Boeing Starliner, a passenger craft set to detach from the International Space Station on September 6th and fly on autopilot toward a touchdown in the New Mexico desert.
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In a clip of the conversation, Wilmore reiterates that the pulsating noise is coming from inside the speakers aboard the Starliner. “I’ll do it one more time and let you all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” he tells Mission Control before playing the sound again. NASA has not commented on if the source of the sound has been identified.
For weeks, Wilmore and his colleague Suni Williams have been stranded in space after significant technical problems with the Starliner were identified, including helium leaks. A recent agreement struck with private aerospace company SpaceX will see the two return on an Elon Musk-made spacecraft, but not until February. The two have already been aboard the ISS for more than three months. Their stranding is a double whammy for Boeing, which had hoped launching Wilmore and Williams into space would breath new life into the company’s struggling Starliner program. Years of delays and ballooning costs have seen the company lose market share and valuable government contracts to competitors like SpaceX and now must contend with allegations that its spacecrafts, like its commercial aircrafts, are unsafe. Boeing insists that all recent thruster tests purported to show a healthy set of Starliner spacecrafts before the ISS incident.
Officials have claimed that they are not stranded in orbit. “We are taking our time and following our standard mission management team process,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a statement according to CBS News. “We are letting the data drive our decision-making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking.”
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