ULA’s Atlas V rocket launched on Wednesday morning from Florida, sending the first Boeing Starliner capsule with crew into orbit. NASA Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are conducting the crew flight test of Starliner and will spend about a week at the International Space Station.
NASA has shed new light on this weekend’s space mystery aboard the International Space Station, where an unusual sound could be heard from the speaker inside Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft while docked at the ISS.
The space agency revealed today that the mysterious noise was the result of a specific audio configuration between the space station and the Starliner spacecraft.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft launched NASA’s astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams
(NASA)
“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,” read the NASA statement addressing the audio quirk.
NASA said the pulsing sound has stopped and has had no “technical impact to the crew.”
Former Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield shared his reaction to the noise over the weekend.
“There are several noises I’d prefer not to hear inside my spaceship, including this one that Boeing Starliner is now making,” Hadfield wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Astronauts remain stuck in space until February
The Starliner arrived at the ISS in early June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams as part of Boeing’s crew flight test to certify the spacecraft to fly future human missions.
However, after a series of problems with helium leaks and reaction control thrusters, Starliner will return to Earth on Sept. 6 without its astronaut crew, and the astronauts will come home on a different spacecraft.
Wilmore and Williams will remain on the space station until February 2025, when they will return to Earth in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, along with two other astronauts, as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission.
To make room on Dragon, NASA opted to launch NASA astronaut Nike Hague and Russian Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov and leave two seats open for Wilmore and Williams. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson were bumped from the Crew-9 mission and could fly on a future mission.