Why isn there a sonic boom when the shuttle reaches the speed of sound after lift-off?
Sound moves out and away from you in a circle, like a ripple in a pond from a stone, at a rate of about 700 mph. So if you fly 700 mph, all the noise you make builds up as a wave that moves along with you. During launch, we are going straight up, so that wave is travelling with us up. By the time we turn to parallel the Earth’s surface, we’re so high that there’s no air to carry the sound. If you were in an a balloon at about 20,000 feet at the Cape, you would hear the Boom as the Shuttle climbed by. But the folks on the ground are all behind the Shuttle, so they never hear it.
Related Questions
- Can you hear the sonic boom that the Space Shuttle makes when it goes through the sound barrier from inside the Shuttle?
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- Why isn there a sonic boom when the shuttle reaches the speed of sound after lift-off?
