Loud launches: Researchers study how rocket noise affects endangered wildlife

A flock of birds takes flight during the rollout of the space shuttle atlantis to the launch pad in 1988.

Rocket launches are extreme events, for animals as well as humans.

"When the [space] shuttle lifts off, the main engines roar so loudly that a person standing near the pad would be killed — not by the heat of the exhaust, but by the sound of the engines," Rodney Rocha, a former chief structural engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a 2005 interview with the space agency.