Boeing Starliner spacecraft creating ‘strange’ sonar pings from space station

Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft is sending out a “strange” sound while docked at the International Space Station, according to communication between NASA astronauts and mission control in Houston.

Starliner arrived at the International Space Station in early June with NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore 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.

In the meantime, Wilmore and Williams continue to monitor Starliner as it’s still docked at the ISS.

Wilmore told mission control that on Saturday, the astronauts heard an unusual sound from the speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft. 

“There’s a strange noise coming through the speaker,” Wilmore told Mission Control in the recording.

Wilmore put his microphone next to the speaker, allowing mission control to hear the pulsing noise. Mission control responded, saying it sounded like a “sonar ping.”

“Why don’t ya’ll scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore said. “Alright, over to you, call us if you figure it out.”

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. 

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.