Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft carried astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the International Space Station.
NASA/Johnson Space Center
Update: In a statement sent to SpaceNews’ Jeff Faust, NASA said the sound has stopped and offered an explanation: “The speaker feedback was the result of an audio configuration between the Space Station and Starliner,” NASA said. “The Space Station audio system is complex, with multiple interconnected spacecraft and modules that often experience noise and feedback.” NASA added that the feedback has no technical impact to the crew or spacecraft operations.
The ill-fated mission to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft has run into trouble once again. The two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who only recently learned they would be staying on the ISS until at least February, began hearing strange noises coming from the Boeing spacecraft over the weekend.
“We’re hearing some weird noises coming from the speakers,” Wilmore said in an audio recording by an enthusiast to the Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, on Aug. 31. “We don’t know what it’s causing.”
Mission Control told Wilmore they would investigate the regular pulsating noise. New ScientistBoeing referred requests for comment to NASA, which did not immediately respond.
The Starliner spacecraft delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS on June 5, but a thruster failure and helium leak made the planned return trip with passengers deemed too risky.
The noise has baffled space industry experts and mission control. “It’s very strange,” said Martin Burstow of the University of Leicester in the UK. “I’ve never been on a spacecraft before, so I have no idea.”
Social media posts have speculated that sonar interference might be the culprit, but sound waves don’t travel in space, so such interference couldn’t come from outside the capsule, says Jonathan Aitken of the University of Sheffield in the UK. “My guess is it’s not a big deal,” he says. “The bigger question for me is whether it’s a single speaker that’s making the noise, or the whole communications system?”
To investigate the source of the noise, Barstow recommends a thorough inspection of the aircraft. “Find out where there are microphones that might be providing input and isolate them,” he says. “But the sound could also be coming from the audio system electronics.”
Barstow noted that the regular but occasionally erratic nature of the pulse may support the idea that this is a problem with electronic interference.
This hypothesis is supported by Phil Metzger of the University of Central Florida, who helped test the ISS’s intercom system as co-founder of NASA’s Swamp Works research facility at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “Electromagnetic interference (EMI) is very common and difficult to eliminate,” he wrote to X.
Metzger said: New ScientistIn response to an interview request from SpaceX, astronaut John McClellan explained on social media that the interference could be coming from outside the Starliner: “During one test, we heard a noise that we tracked down to its source and found to be coming from a power inverter that is part of the test facility and not the spacecraft,” he wrote. “We believe that the noise on Starliner was due to electromagnetic interference leaking into something like an audio cable with a loose braid at the connector interface.”
What to do about it is another matter: Wilmore’s radio communications with Mission Control suggest that neither he nor Williams were overly concerned about the noise, but were confused as to its source.
There’s no rush to find out what the problem is, since Starliner is scheduled to return to Earth on its own on September 6. “I don’t think it’s significant since there won’t be a crew on board, but anything unusual should always be investigated,” Barstow said. “It might shed some light on an underlying problem.”
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