![[hand]](/hs-pics/portraits/hands/gillan4.jpg)
![[face]](/hs-pics/portraits/faces/gillan2.jpg)
Good morning, Discovery!
NASA has a long standing tradition of greeting every morning the astronauts in space with music:
Use of music to awaken astronauts on space missions dates back at least to the Apollo Program, when astronauts returning from the Moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate to the occasion. The Apollo 15 crew, whose spacecraft was named “America,” (sic) [This was actually the name of the Apollo 17 command module] was awakened one morning with a segment of “The City of New Orleans” beginning with the lyrics, “Good morning America, how are you?” Several crews have awakened on their final day in space to Dean Martin’s popular song “Going Back to Houston.”
The common element of all these selections is that they promote a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps among the astronauts and ground support personnel. That, in fact, is the sole reason for having wake-up music; and it is the reason that NASA management has neither attempted to dictate its content nor allowed outside interests to influence the process.
On day 15 of the space shuttle Discovery’s STS-120 mission (that must have been November 6) Space Truckin’ was played for Expedition 15/16 Flight Engineer and STS-120 Mission Specialist Clay Anderson.
The astronauts were also greeted with Space Truckin’ on January 17, 2003, the second day of the fateful STS-107 mission. The song was played for Kalpana Chawla at her request.
We welcome the everynauts’ safe return home.
Thanks to Mary Kelley for the info.
Unauthorized copying, while sometimes necessary, is never as good as the real thing
Nice touch.
November 9th, 2007 at 19:43They should play them the entire “Down to Earth” album.
November 10th, 2007 at 01:31Who knows which recording that’s from? I don’t recognize it.
November 10th, 2007 at 03:11Sounds like Nobody´s Perfect.
November 10th, 2007 at 14:22That’s Rainbow’s excellent album with Graham Bonnet on lead vocals.
November 11th, 2007 at 06:23Hope they will never have to play “Lost contact”!
November 11th, 2007 at 17:15For the (friend) Mike
see it on
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/510CK4MZZBL._SS500_.jpg
ciao
November 13th, 2007 at 17:27bye
cheers (like usually Mr.Universe Gillan says 🙂 )