Astronauts Need Wake Up Songs, Too

It turns out NASA does have a sentimental, entertaining side to their multi-billion dollar space exploits. Since the beginning of the space race, astronauts have been waking up on their various craft to tunes radioed to them from earth such as “Here Comes the Sun”, “Fly Me to the Moon” (various recordings of it), and, of course, the theme to Space Odyssey: 2001. On the most recent mission, Houston played Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.” If I were going to go on a spacewalk, I would also want to hear Dire Strait’s “Walk of Life”, as the members of STS-114 did. Astronauts also get tunes sent from Earth by their families, a repertoire which has included their children doing covers of “The Rainbow Connection” and “Time Bomb”.
It’s not just people who get musical love from mission control, either. The Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner Rovers, for example, were called upon by such greats as Wagner, Randy Newman, Genesis, and the Blues Brothers. Because machines need love too. If you want to make your own morning mixtape, you can consult a list of all the songs that have been played in astronaut wake up calls (pdf) and listen to what a groggy astronaut sounds like .
Read more at NASA, listen to the wake-up songs of STS-114, and see our heavy-metal-esque documentary on the last night launch of Space Shuttle Endeavor.