Contributor: Elon Musk's rocket launches are a nuisance for this California town

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The sonic booms often arrive without warning. In the strawberry fields outside Lompoc, Calif., farmworkers flinch and look skyward. They feel the vibrations in their toes. Children jump in their seats in classrooms a few miles away. Inside the Lompoc federal prison complex, more than 3,000 inmates absorb the shock waves and rattling walls with no way to escape them. And across a coastline the Chumash people have considered sacred for thousands of years, the ground shudders.

This is what a SpaceX launch feels like from below.