“
All engines running . . . “Zero!” Alan Shepard was prepared, his body tensed, and in its blaze of flame and torrents of cracking ice, Apollo 14 began its mission. The astronauts felt a gentle sense of motion, mildly jerky at first, but to their surprise “a very gentle rise.” It wasn’t that way outside. The Saturn V roared, bellowed, and shrieked, hurling out ear-stabbing sonic waves and a crackling thunder which sent birds flying and wildlife fleeing, and which slammed into people miles away, fluttering their clothing and causing them to step back uncertainly. The sound was so great its shock waves tumbled and mixed together, swirling deep thunder with an acetylene-torch cry that continued impossibly long, echoing from clouds, rebounding across the ground, seeming to split the very sky asunder. The earth shook, a feeling akin to the jellied trembling of an earthquake. The longer the first stage burned, the farther its stentorian bellow hurtled outward. Scientists judge the savage roar of the Saturn V akin to the explosion of the volcano Krakatau, which tore apart the islands of the Sundra Strait in 1883.
”
”