NASA is to end the 50-year ban on supersonic flights over land in the U.S.

I was in high school in OKC when the sonic boom testing was happening. It got very routine.

Except of course, Concorde did not appear from scratch overnight and Boeing's SST project was known to be doomed for a long time so the ban was brought in in the knowledge that the USA was out of (lost?) the race. As for the sonic boom argument, that too is a red-herring. The routes flown supersonically over populated areas would have been effectively NIL, helped enormously by the great circle routes to and from the USA, west and east.

I grew up in the 1960s when it was still common to hear sonic booms in the USA.. I recall them sounding like a thunderclap at a moderate distance. We would hear one and remark about it between us kids when we were playing outside.

I grew up in West Germany (before the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic united), and lived in a low-level flight training corridor. In addition to the low-flying aircraft passing over our village, sonic booms from military aircraft at higher altitudes were pretty much a daily occurrence.

I don't remember them being much of a nuisance. Probably not something you would want to have happen while you're trying to sleep, but really not a big deal.

The closest thing to that has been the now-retired Space Shuttle landing in the California desert. It always announced itself with a double-boom (just like some of the aircraft of my childhood did).

I live about 75 miles east of the Nellis test range. From here in southwest Utah, it sounds like distant thunder.

See https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/02/archives/the-concorde-flies-over-populated-areas.html

I am also old enough to have lived when sonic booms were fairly common and I remember them being irritating. At least as much as loud firecrackers. It is probably an exaggeration to say they reduce milk and egg production but I think it is likely they would scare animals that do not understand what is happening.