cape canaveral and the sonic boom

diary entry on hucsat’s launch on a falcon 9

i woke up at 4am. it took me no time. i was the last one in the living room, where my former classmates were delicately popping popcorns into their mouths. the popcorn itself was tinged with a light sweetness that pervaded the mouth, almost like a film of pure taste, with no material or weight attached. it might have been stevia. they called it our pre-launch ritual.

it was to be our first launch, and what i keep referring to as my only one in a lifetime (i have launched off aerospace). this morning, we launched our nitinol payload cube satellite into space (2U), and i saw a cylinder of pure might barrel, not rush, but puncture the sky as we know it, the sound like drilling a city of concrete in one fell swoop. it turned the blue into three dimensions, a density gradient, a soft amorphous thing capable of the harshest, most physical, most primordial power: the governing barrier of a whole world. the entry, the exit, the door.

it made me think of the tangibility of certain ancient sciences.

under a microscope, if I poke the dish, the image moves. in this way, I make contact. that palpable world exists, is more and more observable each day. it only awaits explanation. when followed, that natural inquiry digs smaller, burrows precisely, until the work becomes as abstract as shapes, attractions, and states.

but space seems to be, from the start, a language of absolutes. we looked at the sky for signs, for gods, for pointers north during navigation. it was a perpetual map waking us up, bidding us goodnight. it is an unreachable asymptote of any species on land or water. no staircase could reach it. no mountain could top it. it must be the place of death, or birth, where only unexplainable comings of spirit can be placed above.

these assumptions did not stop us from assembling a rocket, the tip of which would pierce, would see, would cross; the 200-feet body of which would hold fuel costing a small nation, covered in choice new metal, with each nail secured with special new locking gels — all for the sake of up.

for how would we ever see past the sky? we’d have to believe in the figures, numbers, stars, charts. we’d have to punch through, to lead with curiosity and follow with a skyscraper of fuel. we’d have to have a pure belief in the abstract.

in purgatorio, this sky is where our aerial bodies became vaporized. you see, dante brought a scientific edge to this transition, a curiosity of atomization. things blur at the border: science and spirituality.

with stairway to heaven, cai guo qiang takes fireworks to light up a path of smoke to tiangong. it’s a song, it’s a riot. that the ascent is fire, then smoke, is true still. we are both reaching for something.

in matisse’s late life, he punctured his sky through paper. Icarus flew and fell, and the altitude couldn’t be determined – it was a weightless, endlessly deep blue. I wrote a scrappy, sappy poem about it three years ago:

and if i dive
into the rift of sky
with limbs as paper–cuts
in this too-forgiving
blue,
and if my arms,
my misshapes of shadow,
my frayed bounds
and new way with scissors
splits this thick fabric
too clean,
and if this puncture
in the chest beats too,
sniper dot, red-hot,
a heart composed
from searing,
for seeing, if the rips
and the punch-throughs,
the sharp-edges and old
scrapes are only bright
enough for a good sum
of stars,
if this world is a body just tucked around mine
it will be enough, enough and more.

progress seems to want culminate behind one object. it’ll rush atmosphere like a sonic boom.

today’s was a triple boom, because we were on a spacex rocket. i’ll explain the concept. first, we must reframe sound as a physical substance: pressure. second, we must look at the atmosphere like an exponentially dense concentration of air. when air compresses, pressure gathers and folds in on the edges, sweeping out, catching up.

to travel the speed of sound is to travel at Mach 1. to travel faster, well, you could be looking at a rocket.

when a rocket reenters the atmosphere, as the falcon9 does to repurpose itself so perfectly on its launchpad, it goes at Mach 6 or 7 – six to seven times fast.

the pressure, the wave, is slower than the object. as the falcon9 hurtles downwards, the air moves out of the way, pressurizing on the edges of its path, collecting in a cone, lagging. physically, it hasn’t reached you yet. the cone of sound drags behind its nose of metal, starting small, but sweeping out. when the circumference of that cone reaches your ears, you hear the sound. a manmade thunderclap of metal, sounding thrice for each protruding element on the body of the Falcon 9.

the nose of the sonic boom today took the shape of christopher pranito, katelyn miller, and the current harvard aerospace team. through their engineering nights, this culmination of years of work has launched off. grace and i took the day looking at the sky. grace had onboarded me on the team, and i had onboarded chris. it seemed like yesterday, we were only just looking at stars. now, we can look up to count a couple years of engineering exploration, walks across the river, nitinol orders, furnace frights and current tests as another imperceptible patch of the sky. it takes a whole team to crane a neck.