The successful midair landing of a SpaceX Super Heavy booster in October generated a sonic boom audible for miles, highlighting the powerful sound associated with Starship launches.
A SpaceX Super Heavy rocket booster, as tall as a 20-story building, reappeared in the skies over South Texas minutes after liftoff 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. 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. Similar sonic booms are expected to ring out each time SpaceX returns a Super Heavy booster back to its Starbase launch site, which lies near Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border at the state’s southernmost tip. So far, the company has conducted six test flights of a fully stacked Starship rocket from the area, but so far only the October flight — Flight 5 — has had a Super Heavy booster return for landing. Federal regulators have already green-lit the next test flight, Flight 7, that could see the Super Heavy booster head back for a landing. As the lower stage of the Starship system, the booster initially vaults the Starship spacecraft, the rocket’s upper stage, toward orbit before heading back to the launchpad
Spacex Starship Rocket Launch Sonic Boom Space Exploration
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