The Saturn V was incredibly loud. Like thousands of jet planes taking off together

What’s the loudest noise you’ve ever heard? Many people will say an airplane engine unless they’re lucky enough to have witnessed a rocket launch. And if there was one rocket that was louder than the rest, it was the Saturn V, the behemoth that launched the Apollo astronauts to the moon. But how loud was it?

About 203 decibels to be precise. A standard aircraft engine in a commercial airliner is around 150 decibels. While a 36 percent increase in noise level over a typical jet engine doesn’t sound like a significant difference, remember that decibels are plotted on a logarithmic scale. That means every 10 dB is actually an order of magnitude more noise. So a 160 dB tone is ten times louder than a 150 dB tone.

By this calculation, a Saturn V 10,000 taking off is louder than a standard commercial jet engine. That’s a pretty serious sonic feat, and it’s fueled some myth in certain parts of the internet. Enough that scientists have addressed an educational paper directly to them.

Internet legend has it that the Saturn V was so loud its acoustic energy would liquefy concrete and set nearby fields on fire. But these phenomena, if they occurred at all, are much more likely to be caused by the exceptionally hot plume of fire emanating from the rear of the rocket engines than anything acoustic.

But the thought of sound waves causing such devastation shows how little is known about them. So a team of scientists decided to write a paper debunking these claims and assessing how loud the Saturn V was as part of a special educational edition of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

A team from Bringham Young University used some models of the Saturn V’s physics to estimate how noisy it would be. The number they found, 203 dB, was very similar to the limited acoustic data collected in the ’60s and ’70s when the missile was in regular service.

If you’re interested in their techniques or just miss the time to do physics homework at school, the paper also includes some homework that might be useful in college classrooms. It might even help you calculate the decibel levels of another roaring rocket engine.

The Space Launch System will be the first rocket more powerful than the Saturn V when it launches. Technology has improved tremendously over the past 60 years, so there is no guarantee the SLS will be in the same acoustic range as the Saturn V Starship, which is said to be even more powerful, offers another opportunity Test your acoustic modeling skills or simply experience a deep guttural vibration if you can witness it.

Both launches are undoubtedly targets for a range of acoustic gathering technologies this time around. But even with all the data in the world, it will probably be impossible to stop the internet from telling tall tales about the power of this new class of massive missiles. While the stories that emerge from this may be amusing, please don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

Learn more:
American Institute of Physics – Saturn V was noisy but didn’t melt concrete
Gee et al. – Saturn V Sound Levels: A letter to the Redditor
Subtitles – Falcon Heavy Vs. Saturn v
UT – What is sound?

main image:
Launch image of a Saturn V.
Credit – NASA