Boeing Starliner emitting strange noses

The Boeing Starliner was, in technical terms, a bit of a Fuck’. His development was blocked by Boeing’s greedand now the spacecraft is stuck on the International Space Station, unable to transport its astronauts home. The ship is now scheduled to undock and return home later this week, but since that announcement a new problem has emerged: The Starliner is haunted by unexplained noises.

Ars Technica has audio captured by astronaut Butch Wilmore aboard the Starliner, where a repeated “ping” can be clearly heard coming from the module’s speakers. Neither Wilmore nor the ground crew had an explanation for the noise:

Wilmore, apparently floating in the Starliner, then put his microphone on the speaker in the Starliner. Shortly after that, there was a ping that was quite distinctive. “Okay, Butch, that one’s through,” mission control radioed Wilmore. “It was kind of like a pulsating noise, almost like a sonar ping.”

“I’m going to do it one more time and let you all scratch your heads and see if you can figure out what’s going on,” Wilmore replied. The strange sonar-like sound repeated itself. “Okay, over to you. Call us if you figure it out.”

So far, noise hasn’t appeared to be a major problem, but it’s just another in the litany of problems the Starliner has faced. Somehow, a company led by Elon Musk is our best shot at real, viable space travel for now. That’s damn it, Boeing.

You can tell we’re really living in the future because it sounds like conversations like this exact like the calls you get when a friend buys a crappy car against your advice and starts asking you for help with every problem. They’ll give you a phone, put the loudspeaker on the engine, give you a horrible noise and ask you for a diagnosis right there – it won’t be until 2024 that we might have boxes of shit in space.

A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik.