Sonic booms
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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.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/24/science/spacex-starship-sonic-boom/index.html
