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SPACE ODDITY — Songs to start your day. In space. |
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Written by asap
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Saturday, 15 July 2006 |
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 HOUSTON — These are not your father’s astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery -- at least judging by the music that’s been waking them up every morning.
So far in their two-week mission, the crew’s wake-up calls have included songs by Coldplay, Smashmouth and R. Kelly.
What ever happened to “Anchors Aweigh”?
For decades, it’s been a tradition for NASA’s mission control to start astronauts’ days with carefully chosen wake-up calls. In the case of the current Discovery mission, those days start at about 1 a.m. EDT, so it helps to play something that gets the blood flowing and the foot tapping. (Tapping on the ceiling? It is space, after all.)
Astronauts’ tastes have come a long way from the early days, when “Hello Dolly” was the first wake-up call in 1965 for Gemini 6. The rest of that decade was full of military marches and songs, along with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Herb Alpert and classical music.
Today’s astronauts have music that they can rock to while they roll in zero gravity.
“I was impressed,” Blender magazine associate editor Josh Eells said. “I had this notion of astronauts being a little bit square. There’s a little bit of hip taste there.”
But taste, of course, is in the ear of listener. Asked by asap if everyone likes all the songs played up there, astronaut Piers Sellers just rolled his eyes and shook his head.
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SPINNING THE TUNES
Back in Houston, the DJing job goes to the capcom -- “capsule communicator” — the astronaut on the ground who radios to the ones in space.
Astronaut Mario Runco, the capcom for 16 flights between 1995 and 2002, likes to think of himself as a “senior editor” of the list of requests given to him by astronaut families, friends and co-workers.
When Runco rolled his tape — NASA mission control only recently started using a CD player -- he had a few rules: Don’t step on the music. Play a full two minutes. Try to pick a good fade out point.
But no matter how hard Runco tries to do justice to the music, the shuttle isn’t exactly a place to get good sound.
“The speakers are fine for voice communications but their dynamic range is awful for music,” Runco said in an e-mail. “Bose speakers they’re not.”
But on one of Runco’s own trips to space, sound quality wasn’t a problem. A huge Star Trek fan, Runco was awoken by a taped personal greeting from Patrick Stewart — Jean-Luc Picard himself, from “Star Trek: The Next Generation” — set to the show’s theme music. In the greeting, Stewart said to Runco: “Make it so.”
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SPACE BEATLE
Getting a prerecorded call is one thing, but last November, international space station astronauts Bill McArthur and Valery Tokarev were treated to a live wake-up miniconcert by Paul McCartney -- part of a performance he was giving in Anaheim, Calif.
“I can’t believe that we’re actually transmitting to space,” McCartney said as McArthur did a zero-gravity flip.
McCartney played “English Tea” and “Good Day Sunshine,” in what was the longest Earth-to-space wake-up call, clocking in at nearly 14 minutes.
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GROUND CONTROL TO MAJOR TOM
Here are a few hits and misses from the wake-up songs on Discovery’s current flight, and from a few other trips to space.
The song: “Clocks”
The band: Coldplay
When: July 10, for astronaut Piers Sellers, sent up by his family.
Blender’s Eells gives this choice a critical thumbs-up — but more importantly, it got a good review from Sellers: “That was beautiful.”
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The song: “All Star”
The band: Smashmouth
When: July 11, for astronaut Lisa Nowak, from her family.
Nowak’s response: “It’s really cool being a little bit closer to the skies up here.”
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The song: “I Have A Dream.”
The band: Abba
When: July 9, for pilot Mark Kelly, from his family.
When teased about the song, Sellers came to Kelly’s defense: “That was Mark’s kids’ favorite song. I used to be an ABBA fan.” On Friday, Kelly himself added that Abba is “certainly not as bad as what we had to wake up to this morning” -- the Texas A&M “Aggie War Hymn.”
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The song: “Space Oddity.”
The artist: David Bowie.
When: June 1996, and again in October 2002.
One of many space songs rock stars have written -- and a good choice for a space wake-up call, Blender’s Eells said. In 1996, astronauts highlighted the “Major Tom” section of the song, in honor of Columbia’s commander, Tom Henricks.
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The song: “Rocket Man”
The artist: Elton John
When: October 2002.
“Fortunately, rock stars seem to be fascinated with space,” Eells said. “There’s all sorts of songs about stars and suns and space.”
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The songs: “Burning Down The House” and “I say a Little Prayer”
The artists: Talking Heads and Dionne Warwick
When: January 2003.
In retrospect, the choice of these songs is ominously meaningful. They were played during the flight of the shuttle Columbia, which burned up on re-entry on Feb. 1, 2003.
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FIND EVEN MORE SONGS ONLINE
See a list of all the NASA space wake-up calls: http://history.nasa.gov/wakeup%20calls.pdf
Listen to the wake-up calls from the last 30 missions: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/index.html
Watch the Paul McCartney concert that was broadcast to space: http://www.nasa.gov/mission—pages/station/expeditions/expedition12/i ndex.html
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Seth Borenstein is an AP science writer based in Washington, D.C. He’s currently in Houston covering the shuttle mission.
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