Live fairly close to KSC. Watched the launch. Normally you hear and feel it shortly after for 10 seconds or so. Today, shortly after the failure you could hear it as normal. But, this time it went on for minutes louder than normal. And had the sound of hundreds of rumbles at a time. I know of no other way to explain it. Could this have been caused by many large pieces of debri traveling above speed of sound resulting in many, many sonic booms? Little beyond my intelligence. Thoughts?

Hopefully Mr. Gilman did not read this before I corrected spelling.

One of these days, they will perfect this whole space rocket thing. It is not like it is rocket sci......never mind....

As someone said, a rocket is basically an explosion looking for any way to happen. Any time you release that much energy, that quickly, it's going to be stupid dangerous. Eventually we'll get a space elevator in place, then it'll change, but until then, it's basically blowin up stuff real good in order to get to space.

The only large pieces I saw looked like ice- when those explode, it's usually from a breach in a place where it's supposed to seal and since the bulk of a rocket isn't large, thick pieces, moving fast doesn't necessarily cause sonic booms. It seemed to leak and it's possible that the two stages didn't separate before the 2nd ignited.