NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) reported Saturday hearing a “strange noise” coming from the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, days before it was scheduled to leave the station and return to Earth on autopilot.
Astronaut Butch Wilmore radioed Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to inquire about the noise.
In the recording of the conversation, Wilmore can be seen holding the phone on speaker so Mission Control can hear the noise he is referring to.
Wilmore's device emits a regular pulsating sound.
“Butch, we got that,” Mission Control said, after initially not hearing it. “It was a pulsating sound, almost like a sonar signal.”
“I'm going to do it again and have you all scratching your heads and seeing if you can figure out what's going on,” Wilmore told Mission Control, playing the sound again.
Mission Control told Wilmore that the recordings would be forwarded and that they would let him know what they found.
Wilmore clarified that the sound was coming from speakers inside the Starliner.
That strange sound First reported Ars Technica cited the recording, which was first captured and shared by Michigan-based meteorologist Rob Dale.
Fox News Digital has reached out to Mission Control and Boeing to ask if the source of the sound has been identified.
The Starliner will undock from the ISS and land empty on autopilot in the New Mexico desert for return.
NASA decided it was too risky to send Wilmore and Sani Williams back until February.
The astronauts were originally scheduled to embark on the week-long trip in early June, but the mission has been hit by problems due to thruster failures and helium leaks.
Boeing had hoped that Starliner's first crewed flight would help revive the troubled spacecraft program after years of delays and ballooning costs. The company had maintained that Starliner was safe based on all recent thruster tests, both in space and on the ground.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
