So Sam & I got to experience something REALLY cool yesterday.
We were both sitting on the couch and we heard two loud thud-like crashes in our living room. At first we thought it was a gigantic car accident on the road right outside of our apartment so we both shot up and looked off the balcony but saw nothing. We continued to speculate - maybe there was an accident in the parking garage across the street and we just can't see it, or maybe it was gun shots coming from downtown Burbank. But after assuring ourselves that we were indeed safe - and had no idea what had happened - and realized speculating was much more of a waste of our time than whatever reality TV we were watching - we turned back to the boob tube.
Later that night, Joe & Derek had two friends over and we hung out a lot to play some foosball and card games. One of the guys asked if any of us had heard the space shuttle reentering the atmosphere that day. We were like... uh, what? He went on to say that we would have heard a double sonic boom that could have been strong enough to break windows where we live.
Sam & I heard a double sonic boom. How cool is that?!
The Discovery Space Shuttle reentered the earth's atmosphere right here off the coast of CA. I have since done a bit more research about it - since I was (a) curious and (b) there isn't a NASA station anywhere near here. Apparently the weather was too bad (and had been bad for quite some time since they were supposed to land several days ago) for the shuttle to land near Florida (NASA's primary shuttle base), which is why they decided to land here.
More information can be found here:
Very neat! Sonic booms were a daily event when I was growing up in Minnesota. I think that now the law requires that jets avoid booming in residential areas or something.
ReplyDeleteHere's an idea outlined by someone who responded to the la times article if you know in advance that a shuttle is coming into Edwards:
ReplyDeleteDrove from San Diego with my Clamper buddy Joe and my dog Randy to a vantage point southeast of the runway at Edwards and witnessed the shuttle landing and the sonic booms first hand. What an awesome sight and sound. The location was very easy to get to following my DeLorme map. Came up the 395 to Shadow Mountain Rd. (a well maintained dirt road)headed 14 miles west to 200th Street East and about two miles to the vantage point.
The booms had so much clarity, like fireworks. The shuttle dropped very quickly from the sky and coasted to a perfect landing. One less thing on my bucket list. Bring a good pair of binoculars, 7x50, if you go and check out the crashed jets littering the ground of the dry lake bed.