Bang! Bang!

So yesterday, The Wife and I were in the car, driving to go meet our friends for a nice dinner and an evening at a play -- a luxurious sort of event. More about the play later. Anyway, we groomed ourselves and got in the car. No sooner than five houses down the street did we hear two very loud cracks, in quick succession.

I thought it might be one of our neighbors, who was trying out one of his dirt bikes, and he could have had a backfire. So I turned around. "What was that?" asked The Wife. The guy on the dirt bike didn't seem to be doing anything unusual. "I hope it wasn't the car," I said, and pulled over to go out and see if we'd blown out a tire or somthing.

As I did that, it occured to me that the sound might have been gunshots and here I was stopping the car, with my beloved Wife in it, and getting out, unarmed, into an area where people might be using guns with malice.

That's when another neighbor called out the solution to the problem:

"Space shuttle."

Of course. It always makes a double sonic boom and it can be quite loud. Quite a relief as I had belatedly realized I'd exposed myself to danger only to realize that there really was none. And the fact that we were hearing it meant it had already passed overhead -- by definition, it was travelling faster than the sound it made when it made it.

Apparently this landing cracked beer mugs as far away as North Hollywood. We'd even seen in the online newspaper that morning that the Shuttle's landing had been diverted to Edwards at exactly that time, and I'd just forgotten about it. But fortunately, the magic of YouTube means that you can experience it anyway:

When I was a kid, I liked the Shuttle's takeoff for the bright display of fire and the display of power needed to achieve escape velocity. Now that I'm older, and after the Challenger and Columbia were lost, I think the landing is a more beautiful thing to see than the takeoff. This landing looked like it worked like a charm; flawless and controlled.