As a student of the English language, I appreciate the challenge of trying to describe something that readers haven’t experienced. It’s an honor to have your words serve as your audience’s senses, and you don’t want to let them down.
Over the last week, I’ve been observing many writers tackle a particularly difficult task of description: conveying what it’s like to hear the space shuttle lift off.
Having been privileged to witness that twice, I can assure you that no recording does it justice. (I saw Endeavour lift off in May as an attendee of the Tweetup NASA organized for that STS-134 mission, then returned this month with a press pass to write about the STS-135 Tweetup experience at Atlantis’s final launch for Discovery News and, in an article I need to finish writing, for ReadWriteWeb.)
The microphones on a lot of consumer-level gadgets are woefully inadequate to capture the finer points of nearly 7 million pounds of thrust erupting from only three miles away. But even the best audio gear available can’t recreate the feel of the shock waves blasted through the air by that energy, rushing up at spectators and thumping them in the chest. You’d have to set off explosives; pending the Air and Space Museum’s IMAX theater acquiring an ordnance budget and a long series of regulatory waivers, words will have to do.
Which words, though? Although the immediate reaction of many Tweetup attendees was that none would suffice, they found their own in the days after the launch.
It feels like soundwaves hitting you, more than it feels like hearing something. It was completely mad.
THE SOUND! It came at us like a wave, which you could almost see coming, and hit with enough force to act on us as though we were trees bowing in the wind.
Jason Snell (you may also know him as Macworld’s editorial director):
a loud crackling sound as the air was shattered by the forces of the shuttle’s three main engines and its two solid rocket boosters.
A friend on Facebook tried this:
an intense crackling, like someone shaking a metal sheet.
a growing rumble that culminated in a deep, flapping roar that you could feel as much as hear.
Among the assembled press, Ars Technica’s Jonathan M. Gitlin may have had the most creative description:
The first analogy I could think of was a washing machine full of rocks mixed over the sound of tearing giant sheets of canvas.
And me? Here’s how I described it in May:
a relentless, thunderous crackling, rumbling across the sky and through our shirts
But when I wrote an e-mail to my wife the day after the liftoff of Atlantis, I reached for a metaphor:
like fireworks erupting closer and closer and faster and faster until they’re pounding you in the chest.
I’m sad that nobody else will be able to experience this. But how we reached that point is a subject for another post.
Until then: If you’ve had the tremendous fortune to witness a launch from up close, how would you describe that sound?
Rob Pegoraro 