KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – The Space Shuttle — the most complex, but not the most powerful, human-rated spacecraft ever built — rumbled and roared off the launch pad and shook the parking lot at the Kennedy Space Center so hard that car alarms went off.
The sound of the shuttle traveled as much as 35, even 40 miles inland, if the wind was right.
But the next Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, potentially heading for the moon on Wednesday for the Artemis II mission, will be the most powerful operational rocket ever to launch by far, on par with the Artemis I launch in 2022. It will have nearly double the power that the Space Shuttle had — 8.8 million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The shuttle had just 5.3 million thrust pounds.
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NASA’s last mega-moon rocket, the Saturn V, which delivered astronauts to the moon in 1969, had 7.5 half million pounds of thrust at liftoff.
The SLS’s rocket boosters each have an additional section compared to the Saturn V’s. And the SLS has four main engines compared to the space shuttle’s three (and those four main engines are actually recycled space shuttle engines).
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NASA launch commentator Derrol Nail said in 2022 that the sound of any SLS launch will carry farther than previous NASA rockets, but it’s difficult to predict how far.
“What we do know is during Space Shuttle, which was 5.3 million pounds of thrust, it would set off car alarms in the parking lot, Nail said. ”You’d hear them chirping off. That’s here [at the Kennedy Space Center], where we’re about three miles as the crow flies to the pad. So you put that on an order of 50% more powerful and what do you get?”
What you get is several more miles of sound travel, said Dr. Mark Archambault, associate professor of aerospace engineering and dean of academics for the College of Engineering and Science at Florida Institute of Technology.
“Let’s say 45 miles give or take,” Archambault said. “It would be very delayed, the rocket would be well into the sky by the time you hear at that distance.”
As the crow flies, drawing a straight line from launch pad 39B, 45 miles is right at the edge of Downtown Orlando.
It’s also 45 miles to Debary (41 to Sanford) and to the edge of Orange City.
St. Cloud is 46 miles away from the launchpad; Daytona Beach is 45 miles away, and so is Grant-Valkaria just south of Palm Bay.
But Archambault said there are conditions.
“Are there any obstacles between the vehicle and the observer, what kind of obstacles?” said Archambault. “Trees are going to absorb and reflect sound differently than buildings will.”
Archambault said the wind also matters — the wind must be blowing in from the Atlantic to carry the sound inland into Central Florida.
When the launch happens, News 6 will stream it live.