During the launch and ascent flight phases for large space vehicles such as the Space Shuttle, the vehicle itself and the payload it carries can be subjected to high‐level acoustic energy produced by the first‐stage rocket motors. It is highly desirable that certain vehicle and payload components be environmentally qualified before flight and considerable effort has been expended in the search for suitable noise sources that could be used conveniently for the proof testing of space‐vehicle structures and payloads. It had been suggested that the exhaust noise of a Nike solid propellent rocket motor might be suitable to reproduce the interior noise environment that had been predicted for the Shuttle Orbiter cargo bay during lift off. The Nike motor is easy to handle, readily available in reasonable quantity, and relatively low in cost. In order to document the noise field of a typical Nike motor during static firing, noise measurements were recently accomplished at the NASA Wallops Flight Center during the firing of two Nike boosters. The boosters were mounted vertically with the exhaust nozzle up and an array of 16 microphones was located around the test stand. Two boosters of different ages were fired in order to determine the degree of correlation between noise measurements made on motors having different loading dates. This paper presents the results of these measurements in octave and 1/3‐octave form along with appropriate overall noise‐level listings. There was very good agreement between the data as measured for the two Nike motors tested although the first motor was loaded in 1955, and the second motor was loaded in the early 1970's. As applied to the specific case of the Space Shuttle; the noise field of the Nike motor provided a reasonable reproduction of the estimated interior noise levels for the cargo bay in the frequency range of 63–1000 Hz.