Problems for the Starliner, the ship with which Boeing intended to offer NASA an alternative to SpaceX’s Crew Dragonthey seem to have no end. I won’t rehash everything that has happened since June, just remember that what was supposed to be a mission to get the Boeing ship certified to carry out this type of flight turned into a nightmare for the aerospace giant, which had to deal with malfunctions, delays, cost overruns and more.

More than a week ago, after a tense wait, We finally learned that the Starliner will soon return to Earth…but he’ll do it without his crew. Both NASA and Boeing have put their safety above all else, and rather than take the risk of bringing them back in a ship that does not inspire the necessary confidence, they have chosen a “rescue plan” several months ahead, in which they will return to our planet in SpaceX Crew Dragon as early as 2025.

Just yesterday I was thinking about this situation and what it could mean for Boeing. Currently, confidence in the Starliner is far from the best, and the fact that safety has prevented it from being a return vehicle for crew members adds even more (negative) points in that regard. So if the return operation is successfully completed, there may still be some room for confidence, but if there were more incidents, and especially if the Starliner was destroyed in the process, we can almost assume that this would be the end of Project Boeing.

The Starliner docked at the International Space Station and flew over the Mediterranean Sea. Image: NASA.

The problem is that the problems keep popping up. So as we can read in DigitalTrends, Now the astronauts on the Starliner began to hear a strange sound. And indeed, in this strange case, it means that no one was able to. to identify their reason for being, which is most disturbing for obvious reasons. After hearing this, mission control defined it as “a kind of pulsating noise, almost like a sonar beep“.

We hope that a combination of remotely sensed data and the knowledge of Starliner’s engineering teams will allow us to determine the reason for this strange sound. Something major, of course, to decide the immediate future of the ship. The problem is that with the amount of things that have already gone wrong with it, there is little room for optimism about the origin and meaning of that sound.

Images: NASA