It’s been all over the news that NASA’s now admitted that Apollo 10 astronauts heard “odd music” through their radio as they swung behind the moon.
This was during the last rehearsal trip, a couple of months before Neil Armstrong first planted his footsteps into the lunar dust in July of 1969.
So what was this “music”, then? Anyone answering with the title of a certain classic Pink Floyd album can go stand in the corner: that one came out years later, in 1973.
Besides, the total running time for “Dark Side of the Moon” is just under 43 minutes, while astronauts Cernan, Stafford and Young took a whole hour to swing round the backside of the moon with their particular soundtrack.
So it wasn’t Pink Floyd. But, claim some spoilsports, it might have been VHF interference between two radio sets … or it really could have been the music of the spheres.
Much further out from our home planet, the Cassini space probe also picked up “music” ringing out near Saturn, so it’s not just a lunar phenomenon, then.
Now it might just be a momentary lapse of musical reason that 5 Seconds of Summer were awarded their recent New Musical Express “Worst Band” accolade, hands down beating One Direction and even U2.
But it might also be due to the poor quality of popular music on planet Earth these days that NASA received 18,300 applications for their 2017 class of astronauts (14 vacancies at most) before closing the application window, says The Christian Science Monitor.
How many of those would-be space travelers applied because they’d prefer to listen to heavenly space music rather than a compulsory iTunes download, or signed up because they want to get as far away from possible from Harry Styles and friends, we won’t find out until the interview results are made public.
But if NASA is as speedy at releasing information about those interviews as it’s been about releasing information about musical interludes on the far side of the moon, then we can expect to hear about them in about 40 years’ time.
For those who can’t wait for their space fix (plus those 18,286 soon-to-be-disappointed NASA applicants) there’s always the happy news that Disneyland’s recent California closure of their Big Thunder Ranch and its accompanying Jamboree is all about making space for “Star Wars Land”.
And that, says Entertainment Weekly, is why Harrison Ford, AKA (spoiler alert) the late Han Solo appeared on our small screens to introduce us to Disney’s (fanfare) Star Wars Experience. Moming soon to a planet near you, it’ll be featuring encounters with droids, aliens and food vendors offering snacks from a galaxy a long time ago and far, far away.
Let’s hope those snacks haven’t gone past their sell-by date by more than a millennium or two, then.
And as for who’s in charge of the piped music that’s bound to be heard all over the Star Wars Experience? It might be soundtrack wizard John Williams … but then again, it could be NASA. They know what space music sounds like — they’ve got the recordings.
Actually, if it takes NASA another forty years to get their space music act together, our money’s on Williams.
