Why sonic booms from the most powerful rocket ever built have some scientists worried

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Science / Space
Why sonic booms from the most powerful rocket ever built have some scientists worried

By Jackie Wattles, CNN
11 minute read
Updated 8:59 AM EST, Tue December 24, 2024


The Super Heavy rocket booster is caught midair at the SpaceX launchpad near Brownsville, Texas, on October 13 during the Starship's successful fifth test flight. Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty Images

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(CNN) — A SpaceX Super Heavy rocket booster as tall as a 20-story building reappeared in the skies over South Texas minutes after blastoff in October, blazing up its engines to slow its fall back toward Earth. In an unprecedented feat, the booster wowed audiences with a precision midair landing in the arms of its launch tower.

The stunning spectacle — part of a test flight of SpaceX’s Starship, the most powerful rocket system ever constructed — was a moment many viewers witnessed via live stream and broadcast. But only those physically located near the launch site actually experienced the thunderous noise of the event.

As the Super Heavy booster made its way back to a pinpoint landing, an earsplitting sonic boom rang out. … “It truly was one of the loudest things I’ve ever heard or experienced,” said Noah Pulsipher, an applied physics undergraduate at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and a coauthor of a recent study about the noise associated with the Starship launch.

In this photo provided by NASA, Boeing Crew Flight Test astronauts Butch Wilmore, left, and Suni Williams pose for a portrait inside the vestibule between the forward port on the International Space Station's Harmony module and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on June 13.

The sound, detectable miles away at a popular tourist destination, was as loud as a gunshot at close range, according to the study that published in November in the journal JASA Express Letters.

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[mopinko]

1. if they launch them by the hundreds, there will b structural damage.

that’s how it works. repeated jolts cause tiny fracture upon tiny fracture until the thing fails.
had a job doing that stuff once. 1 little crystal in a piece of steel, and every shock it takes makes another little crack. look under a microscope and u see an ever widening chevron.

and w building codes in tx being what they r….