For the two Americans stranded on the International Space Station, things might seem uncomfortably close to the plot of famous space-based thrillers like 2001, or Alien. After nerve-wracking malfunctions on ascent, the Starliner space capsule that took them into Earth orbit is now making a haunting, regular pinging sound.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are like the cast of Gilligan’s Island, but in space. What was supposed to be a one-week mission for them has turned into at least a six-month stay. They rocketed up to the ISS aboard Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule on June 6, but they won’t be riding it back down.
Like Boeing’s commercial aircraft, the Starliner is developing one problem after another. Some of its thrusters mysteriously stopped working on ascent, and then the helium tanks began leaking. NASA has decided the two Americans will go back to earth aboard competitor SpaceX’s Dragon Crew capsule instead.
Now, the Starliner seems intent on freaking out the crew. Wilmore radioed mission control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston on August 31 to report a “strange noise” coming from the module.
Wilmore said he had a “question about Starliner,” which was making a pulsating noise that emanated from speakers aboard the ISS. “I don’t know what’s making it,” he said. Neither did ground control. Wilmore put the phone receiver up to the speaker so the men on the ground could hear it. When they did, a staffer told Wilmore he was hearing a “pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping.”
That is indeed what it sounds like, and the conversation between the astronauts and mission control, plus the mystery sound, can be heard here. It will be familiar to anyone who has watched a submarine adventure film like Das Boot.
There’s no word yet on what may be causing the eerie noise.
This is just the latest trouble for the Starliner, which was supposed to be a larger, 21st-century answer to the small capsules used by the American space program before the era of the Space Shuttle. After $4 billion in development spending, the craft lost nearly 20 percent of its thrusters on the way up (they stopped operating) and the helium tanks can’t seem to hold their gaseous cargo.