The Boeing Starliner That Marooned Two Astronauts for at Least 8 Months is Now Emitting Unexplained 'Strange Noise'

MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO. Getty Images.

For some bizarre quirk of the news cycle, last week there was a ton of attention being paid to the fact that astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were told they won't be coming home from the ISS until February. I use the word "bizarre" because I'd posted that very news back on August 8th:

But whatever. Maybe it became officially official or something. Perhaps NASA finally approved the plan to send them a proper spacecraft, instead of that dick-shaped SS Minnow that was supposed to take them on an eight-day tour, but instead turned them into castaways that are there for a long, long time. 

Regardless, like millions of air travelers at slightly lower elevations, Williams and Wilmore have gotten an abject lesson in what happens when you put your faith - and your life - in Boeing's hands. A week's trip can turn into a semi-permanent assignment in the time it takes for some thrusters to overheat and fail. And it's worth pointing out that NASA got Apollo 13 back safely into the Pacific in just a few days, despite a catastrophic explosion, massive system failures, and the fact they were doing the calculations with slide rules. And that craft had less computing power than a Speak 'n Spell. 

But since last week's news update that was devoid of any actual news, something noteworthy has, in fact, happened. The story has taken a turn for the surreal:

Source - On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.

"I've got a question about Starliner," Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "There's a strange noise coming through the speaker… I don't know what's making it." …

A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via "hardline" to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months. 

Wilmore, apparently floating in Starliner, then put his microphone up to the speaker inside Starliner. Shortly thereafter, there was an audible pinging that was quite distinctive. "Alright Butch, that one came through," Mission control radioed up to Wilmore. "It was kind of like a pulsing noise, almost like a sonar ping."

"I'll do it one more time, and I'll let y'all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what's going on," Wilmore replied. The odd, sonar-like audio then repeated itself. "Alright, over to you. Call us if you figure it out."

A recording of this audio, and Wilmore's conversation with Mission Control, was captured and shared by a Michigan-based meteorologist named Rob Dale.

It was not immediately clear what was causing the odd and somewhat eerie noise. As Starliner flies to the space station, it maintains communications with the space station via a radio frequency system. Once docked, however, there is a hardline umbilical that carries audio.

Hey, no big deal. Just because a spaceship's is emitting noises through its speakers that are "strange," "odd" and "eerie" is no cause for alarm, amrite? Even if the thing is hooked up to the mothership by a cable so it's not supposed to be making any sound. I mean, it's not like picking up creepy signals from space that your best engineers can't explain is the premise of any SciFi stories. 

Wait. Scratch that. This is the first act of pretty much all of them. 

Half your episodes of Star Trek begin with the Enterprise picking a signal, and everything going haywire once they investigated it. Hell, the first Star Trek movie has a signal from interstellar space that turns out to be Voyager coming back to destroy us or something. (It's bad. Skip it and go straight to Wrath of Khan.) In Alien, the Nostromo picks up a distress signal and is contractually obligated to go on a rescue mission. In Independence Day, our monitors pick up the invading ships long before they turn a bunch of tourist destinations into gravel. And meteorologist Rob Dale might as well be Jeff Goldblum's character. In fact, Goldblum could play him in the movie version of this story. If humanity survives whatever made that noise the crippled Starliner picked up. Which is doubtful. Especially if we're relying on Boeing tech to defend ourselves.

Anyway, these two intrepid space travelers chose to put their lives in the hands of people who can't get a door to stay on a 747, and are paying a price. Now they're stuck there until after the Super Bowl. At least. And are picking up weirdo transmissions that the best engineers a government contract can buy are unable to explain. So their ordeal continues. This is no laughing matter, obviously. But I'd be derelict in my blogging duty if I didn't include these brilliant ideas:

I'm all for both. Even though the apes could've built a better space capsule than Boeing did.