Elbahrain.net 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.
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.
The sonic booms associated with that maneuver could raise new environmental concerns for a rocket development program already mired in them.
Sonic boom-related issues may include potential hearing damage or result in minor structural issues for buildings in the area near the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but CEO Elon Musk has downplayed recent reports about sonic boom risks.
“Starbase is an area that experiences storms and hurricanes that are far more serious than Starship launches,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that he purchased in 2022. He added that he believes reports about the phenomenon should say, “Starship Launches Cause No Damage.”
But while no instances of property destruction were publicly reported after the Super Heavy’s first soft landing in October, researchers said they need more data to understand the risks fully.
“I think this has to be carefully watched,” said Dr. Victor Sparrow, a professor and director of the graduate program in acoustics at Penn State who was not involved in the study. “Some people are more sensitive (to noise), and for those sensitive people, this could be a problem for them.”
And if SpaceX makes good on its intention to launch dozens, if not hundreds, of Starship flights per year, it raises questions about how the local community surrounding the company’s launch site might react — and whether the mega rocket could elicit the same pushback as other high-profile vehicles that have sparked sonic boom controversy.
