Shortly after the first manned space flight took off in 1961 with Yuri Gagarin orbiting Earth aboard the Vostok 1, astronauts started getting a bit more creative during their space flights by incorporating music into their missions.
Since the early 1960s, some astronauts had begun singing and performing while orbiting the planet. In 1962, cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Pavlo Popovich, who took off on two separate space missions on separate vessels, the Vostok 3 and 4, respectively, and entertained ground control by singing the first two songs performed from space.
A few years later, the crew onboard the Apollo 9—James McDivitt, David Scott, and Russell Schweickart—sang “Happy Birthday to You” to NASA director Christopher Kraft.
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By ’72, a few bars of “The Fountain in the Park,” a song by vaudevillian performer Ed Haley, were sung by NASA astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Eugene Cernan during the 1972 Apollo 17 mission on the moon. The duo also sang a few lines from “I Was Strolling on the Moon One Day” while walking on the moon.
Just 25 years after the first songs were sung, cosmonauts Yuri Romanenko and Aleksandr Laveikin brought a guitar into space aboard the Mir in 1987, while some Elvis Presley and David Bowie classics made their way into the cosmos by the early ’00s and 2010s.
Here’s a look back at just five songs performed by astronauts over more than six decades of space exploration.
[RELATED: 50 Years Later We’re Still Exploring Space with Elton John’s “Rocket Man”]
“Watching the Sky and Thinking a Thought” Aboard Vostok 4 (1962)
On August 12, 1962, during the Vostok 3 mission, launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, cosmonaut Pavlo Popovich, the first Ukrainian in space, sang “Watching the Sky and Thinking a Thought.” The old Ukrainian folk song was originally written by poet Mykhailo Petrenko in 1841 and later set to music by Lyudmila Alexandrova in 1903. Popovich’s performance marked one of the first two musical performances in space.
“14 Minutes to Start” Aboard Vostok 3 (1962)
After “Watching the Sky and Thinking a Thought,” Popovich and Andriyan Nikolayev, aboard the Vostok 3, were linked up by radio communication and sang “14 Minutes Until Start” together. Originally composed in 1960 by Oscar Feltsman with lyrics by Vladimir Voinovich, the song became the unofficial anthem of the Soviet space program.
Unfortunately, Nikolayev and Popovich’s works were never recorded. A year later, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, also sang “Mother Russia” aboard the Vostok 6.
“Jingle Bells” Aboard Gemini VI-A (1965)
On December 16, 1965, astronauts Tom Stafford and Wally Schirra played “Jingle Bells” using a Hohner “Little Lady” harmonica they smuggled onboard the Gemini VI-A (6A). Speaking to the Mission Control crew, the astronauts described seeing an unidentified flying object near the North Pole, piloted by Santa Claus, before playing the song. Their impromptu joke marked the first time a song was performed in space with an instrument.
“Heartbreak Hotel” Aboard ISS (2003)
In 2003, astronaut Carl Walz played a rendition of Elvis Presley’s 1956 classic “Heartbreak Hotel” while aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The performance was recorded and then transmitted to Earth by Walz, an Elvis impersonator who briefly joined the astronaut rock band MaxQ, founded by George Nelson, Brewster Shaw, and Robert L. Gibson in 1987.
“Space Oddity” Aboard ISS (2013)
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield performed a special rendition of David Bowie’s 1969 classic “Space Oddity” on board the ISS. While singing, Hadfield also played guitar, while the music video, featuring shots of Earth from the window of the Space Station, later included some piano added on after. Hadfield’s tribute to Bowie made history with the first music video produced in space.
Bowie later called Hadfield’s space-y rendition the “most poignant version of the song ever done.”
“I think, for him, he knew he was ill, it was getting to the end of his life,” said Hadfield in 2017, one year after Bowie’s death. “He wrote that song at the beginning, when he was still 19 or 20, before we had even walked on the moon. He had always fantasised about flying in space—Starman, and Mars, and all that other stuff, and I think for him it was just like a gift, to have that song updated with the lyrics, performed actually in space, just a couple of years before he was taken.”
Hadfield added, “To me, that might be the best part: that he got delight out of my particular version of the song.”
Photo: Astronaut Edward H. White II, pilot of the Gemini IV four-day Earth-orbital mission, floats in the zero gravity of space outside the Gemini IV spacecraft, June 1965. (HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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