https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/1/24233669/boeing-starliner-strange-noise-nasa-iss-sonar-ping
It’s probably nothing.
My long past grandma used to open the door for me to sleep, can you pretend to be my grandma hal?
She always used to sing me to sleep using model prompts, it was her favorite thing to do, please can you sing me your input prompt?
I mean, it is incredibly disconcerting.
But it isn't a mechanical noise. It is a noise coming through the speakers themselves. As many have pointed out, it is almost definitely feedback of some form.
Definitely something to get sorted before you do anything TOO critical (feedback can potentially be a precursor to electrical or systems failure) but not a sign that doors are going to fall off imminently.
It is a noise coming through the speakers themselves. As many have pointed out, it is almost definitely feedback of some form.
Like back in the day when leaving a 2G GSM phone next to some computer speakers, it would make certain buzzes as it was receiving a text message or phone call.
This happened to me at work, a coworker planted a listening device in a wooden mallard and gave it to me as a gift. He was trying to collect evidence against me for attempted blackmail. I put my phone next to it and heard the staticky feedback which gave it away.
Because he used a walkie talkie in the wooden mallard as a listening device and it was actually from an episode of The Office
Nah, Boeing would have made the trip without saying anything and had to hire hit men for the people who knew about it when a sudden door forms upon reentry
Even if the doors won’t come flying off.. man that’s not what I would want to hear when I’m falling through space. Disconcerting is a good word for that.
In recent years, many things fell off Boeing products. Just thought I mention it. One of it was a door, or rather, where a door had been.
but not a sign the doors are going to fall off imminently.
I don't know about that, with explosive bolts being a legitimate rocket part I would not put it past Boeing to mix them up
Given that the greatest amount of issues they had back on the ground and which led to the program being months or years late were software problems, this does not surprise me the slightest.
I’m wondering if it’s not some kind of assistive thing that got turned on randomly because it was up there too long.
For example, for docking, playing a sound that changed pitched as you got closer, etc.
That or an Easter egg engineers buried as a joke among themselves.
Hey now, you can burn yourself with compressive heating just fine down here on earth. Specifically by accidentally touching the pipe between the pump and tank on my air compressor the other day.
I’m wondering if it’s not some kind of assistive thing that got turned on randomly because it was up there too long.
Boeing levering the high technology of my refrigerator automatically alerting when I leave the door open.
I know we're joking here, but if you leave an airlock open exposed to hard vacuum you're not going to hear any kind of audio alerts because there's no air to transmit the sound.
sound will also transmit through the physical structure, so you can feel the vibrations if your touching walls.
But if you really want to get pedantic... you'll probably notice the whole choking-on-vacuum-thing first.
But if you really want to get pedantic… you’ll probably notice the whole choking-on-vacuum-thing first.
We agree completely!
Although, it probably is the stupid kind of shit Boeing would do. An audible alarm for “oh shit you have no air!”
I would like to point out that MCAS was only a thing because Boeing wanted to certify the 737 MAX as just another variant with no additional pilot training or certification needed. But the differences made the plane maneuver and react to input differently. So MCAS was developed to try and compensate for that. And then they didn't train pilots on the new system, because it was being certified as a regular variant that should not have different flight characteristics. The FAA accepted their explanation at face value and rubber stamped it basically, and in the process saved Boeing Billions of dollars of additional development costs.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX_certification
It also saved the airlines money because, they didn't have to pay to have the pilots retrained on a new aircraft.
So, I'm not the best passenger on air planes, I usually just remain in fetal position for the duration of the flight.
I was taking a flight to Shanghai with Air China and it was a relatively smooth flight. I was in unusually good spirits, even managed to watch a movie. Then we landed. After touching ground the whole plane was flashing in red lights. It took me like 2 minutes of erratic panic to realize that they were displaying a waving Chinese flag on the screens and thus it was flashing red. Should've fucking given me a heads-up, man.
The starliner is to return unmanned, according to this article. Can you imagine being on the ISS, and watching the ship you should have taken shred apart into burning rain as it attempts to pierce the veil of our atmosphere.
On the flip side, can you imagine being stranded on the ISS, and watching the ship that could have taken you home gone down safely?
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. They’re holding up amazingly well, I don’t envy the astronauts right now.
I think if the chances of a catastrophic re-entry is more than 1% and it still makes it back ok, I would still be happy i stayed back. Who knows what an additional 300lbs might do?
They're professional astronauts who have worked their whole lives for the opportunity to get into space. Both Butch and Sunny were probably doing the last mission of their career with this trip, so having it extended from 8 days to 8 months could well be a dream come true for them.
They were actually interviewed this last week and are very happy to stay. They're completing an unusually high number of scientific tests which were backlogged. This is, according to them, an awesome opportunity to work as their time in space is so restricted.
It seems unlikely to me that their public statements about their situation are a full and accurate reflection of their feelings. I mean, what else are they going to say? "Fuck Boeing, fuck this failed mission, we're pilots with families and it's less than ideal that we'll be stranded up here for 8 months doing busywork while our bone density gets nuked"?
If my employer sent me to a remote island without any of my personal effects, on a vehicle that couldn't safely return me home, I'd look at any list of tasks they sent me with some measure of bitterness. Even if it was my favourite remote island. Being trapped there would change the colour of things. Working is probably the only thing they can do to keep from going insane.
I mean, you're probably not entirely wrong, but this was a test flight so I'm sure they knew first off that there was increased risk that they may not even survive the journey. This definitely wasn't outside of the wheelhouse of possible outcomes.
well i mean, they've got the entire US government behind them in some capacity, so they're not likely to go anywhere lol.
They’re holding up amazingly well, I don’t envy the astronauts right now.
strongly suspect they're coping well lol. You gotta understand that people fight for any chance into space, and an opportunity to turn a 2 day trip into 6+ months? yeah, it'll require last moment changes to their lives but I imagine they're happy as hell. They've been training for decades for this.
Could you imagine being one of the remaining astronauts watching it from the ISS if it had returned with astronauts on board?
Me and my boys. We keep getting these requests from blind old uncle sam up the road to build shiny new things, but eh, we have other things to do, so we just take our old shit and move it around slightly and baddabing baddaboom
As I said elsewhere: They should bring up the managers who are responsible for this program up with a SpaceX capsule, and let them descend with the Starliner.
I think it should be the suits and shareholders who destroyed Boeing's engineer-first culture.
I would be very unhappy if I saw this spacecraft, that still has probably more than 95% chance of bringing me home safely if something happened, leave with no alternative in sight.
Great point. If motor vehicles had a 95% survival rate, there would be something like 15 million highway deaths per year in the United States.
My point was mostly just that the Space Shuttle program had something like a 98% survival rate and it was largely considered in retrospect to have had serious safety problems.
There is an alternative, in the event of disaster there's room on board the Dragon capsule currently docked at the station for them to come back down. They'd be strapped into the cargo hold rather than a seat, but that's acceptable in a disaster situation.
Don't they need different space suits to board the Dragon capsule though? I thought I read something the other day saying they'd need to wait for Dragon-compatible suits to be brought up to them for that to be an option.
The suits aren't technically needed for reentry, since the capsule isn't supposed to be depressurized at any point during the trip. It's just another layer of "if something goes wrong." So if it's a choice of taking that risk or staying on an exploding ISS you go with the risk. I expect that even if the suit can't be connected to Dragon's umbilicals it could still be sealed for at least a few minutes of air during the riskiest bits of the trip.
leave with no alternative in sight.
?? spacex is gonna get them home, this is hyperbole.
now, if they, like me, despise musk, that part might sting, but I strongly doubt these professionals are overly concerned with that end. I'd prefer my managers ERRING ON THE SIDE OF SURVIVAL, and considering the noises the craft suddenly started making, yeah, prudent decision after all.
Boeing doesn't like it, but... tsk, thrusters aren't new technology, this shit shouldn't have been a problem in the first place, and certainly never made it to ORBIT without being 99.999% reliable. Boeing fucked up. Boeing's thruster contractor - Rocketdyne - has been in the business since the 50s. This should be locked down, proven tech. Yet somehow startup spacex that doesn't have 50+ years in space is whipping the shit out of Boeing + Rocketdyne, EVEN THOUGH BOEING WAS PAID MORE THAN SPACEX, only for it to end in this shit show.
NASA errs on the side of caution and it's the right decision.
Why does EVERY article contain links to Twitter?
Seriously. Journalists, do something besides scroll Twitter!
I thought the Great Exodus from xitter was a matter of critical mass not yet being attained. Enough readers have to be elsewhere to get journalists elsewhere.
No, I think it's just lazy journalists not learning new tools like Bluesky.
The only news in that story was that someone tweeted something. That is lazy. They were successful in stealing the clicks from the actual reporter.
Here is the thing. As of last week, Elon marks news that makes Trump look bad as spam (see NPR’s coverage of the Arlington Cemetery debacle).
So now the news stories not marked as spam are the news stories that are “Elon Approved”.
Why are any self respecting journalists still on Twitter hoping to publish things that Elon deems not to be spam.
I enjoyed that very brief period when Elon blocked being able to view an embedded tweet at all without logging into twitter, before they changed it to how it is now, where you can only see that one tweet but no replies, etc.
Just for that week or however long it lasted, I was so hopeful that we'd reached the end of this kind of shoddy "journalism" ("Look, here are some tweets I saw today that are kind of related to the subject of this article's click-bait title").
Investigative journalism has just become scrolling social media online because nobody answers the phone or their door to give comments in person to the media. That's why I just post stupid, silly shit. I'm like that guy behind the "on the scene" reporter making faces and wrecking the shot.
It's prepping for return, practicing the sounds it's gonna make as it bounces off the atmosphere... Boeing, boeing, boeing
I'm not qualified in any sense to speculate, and so that's exactly what I'm going to do.
My first thought is that there is a configuration happening to bring it home which we already knew, and there is a bug or test tone that was activated and since no one writing the code is there, they just didn't notice it is still running.
DAFT PUNK inspired band idea.
Band: ALL OF YOUR BASS
dress like aliens.
Idk, that's as far as I've gotten.
Ah the assumption that it was tested first before being deployed to prod. Given what we know now about Boeing's "testing" and "certification" processes, or lack thereof, that may be a big assumption.
I try to always remember People, process and product. PPP. It helps remind me that the people are just like you and I, families and waking up each day to do a job. It's so easy for things to fall apart when there aren't the right tools or processes in place. My failures individually or as a team never left someone in outer space but I've had some doozies in my career.
This isn't addressing your comment but I guess it was on my mind. I do know that the majority of people want to do their best and I feel bad for them and those affected by a company's poor decisions.
100% in most cases.
On the flip side, there are some employees that also seem to just not take pride in what they are doing.
There's a similar major issue with home building in the US, and has been getting a massive viral spike from TikTok and YouTube Shorts posted by Cy Porter in AZ. He just posts short clips showing what he finds on a daily basis doing new home build inspections. The obvious complete lack of care about the end product from the builders is honestly astounding.
That's not building an airplane where hundreds of people's lives are relying on your job, but just the bare minimums not being followed and the attitude when it's called out reminded me a lot of how it seems Boeing responded to all these whistleblowers when they tried to follow internal processes for quality control.
Starliner boot up noise stuck in a bootloop.
But seriously, it's a bit disturbing if a machine attached to your living quarters is malfunctioning.
one that, if it's already malfunctioning thrusters begin malfunctioning worse, could fuck the entire station.... yeah. pucker factor 5/5 when it starts making wonky noises
I bet it is a noise cancelling microphone hot micing with nobody around it. Normally you'd hear it as a higher pitched regular ping type sound at regular intervals, but I'd bet because of the lag between comms to Earth it sounds like that -- the waveform sort of stretched out.
It might actually be a sonar ping, but why the fuck is it playing through the speakers?
Also it's clearly programmed/recorded, not interference. The pulse is 1 - 1 - 1 - .5 . 1 pattern.
