Recently I had the opportunity to view a rocket launch. My wife and I were about 13 miles away from NASA’s launchpad at Space View Park in Titusville, Florida.
Here is a bit of audio from the launch. I’m not sure how to add captions directly to this file so a bit of a description follows.
The audio starts with a fair amount of crowd noise. Someone was playing a live webcast of the launch in the background and a few seconds into this recording you can hear the rocket launch from that audio. It was really interesting to note how quickly the crowd grew quiet and remained so for about 90 seconds.
Shortly after you hear the rocket, again from the web cast, someone says, “Wow!” Then you hear a child laugh and then say, “Oh my God, I can see it, fire.”
At about 90 seconds there is some applause from the crowd and just a few seconds after that you hear the rumble of the rocket itself while the webcast plays in the background. The rumble continues for the rest of the recording as crowd noise picks up.
At the distance we were from the launch site, it wasn’t the loudness of the rocket I found striking. It was just the full range of the sound spectrum the sound consumed. If power has a sound, that was an example.
The other interesting thing for me that I really didn’t notice as much during the actual launch was how quiet the crowd became. From all the laughter and chatter just before the launch, things go almost silent, excluding camera clicks, for many seconds.
Experiencing a rocket launch live was a first for me. Even though this flight was crewless, it still makes you think about how we’ve harnessed the technology to escape the gravity and atmosphere of our planet. I can’t help but wish we could find the resolve to do the same for many of the other ills that we impose on ourselves as a race here on our home though.