NASA Shares Artemis II Wake-Up Songs in Spotify Playlist

NASA followers can now share a Spotify playlist with the wake-up songs that are being played for the Artemis II mission.“Rise and shine, space fans!” NASA posted on its X account on Wednesday. “Stay tuned to find out the crew’s picks for the rest of the mission,” the post continued. It is the first time NASA has shared a playlist on the streaming service.The songs were selected by the crew for their historic 10-day journey around the moon. The growing list has eight songs on it. While the mission is scheduled for 10 days, there are multiple wake-up songs a day because sleep schedules are broken into segments as short as four hours due to mission needs.The Artemis II crew woke up Wednesday to a short section of “Under Pressure” from Queen and David Bowie. That was followed by a group from the Canadian Space Agency shouting “Good Morning Artemis II.”Some of the other wakeup songs for the mission include “Good Morning” from Mandisa and TobyMac, “Sleepyhead” by Young & Sick, and “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan.When “Pink Pony Club” was cut off, commander Reid Wiseman expressed disappointment. “We were all eagerly awaiting the chorus,” Mr. Wiseman told ground control.Laughter was heard from the Houston control room with the reply, “Oh, we’ll try again next time.”NASA has a long history of playing songs to wake up astronauts in space. The first known wake-up song played for astronauts was “Hello Dolly” for the crew of Gemini 6 in December 1965.An archivist at NASA’s history office, Colin Fries, says there were no formal wakeup calls sent to the crews of Mercury and early Gemini flights because early missions were relatively short. Mr. Fries says while wakeup songs were played on earlier space missions, the tradition seemed to have started on a regular basis after Apollo 10.Actually wakeup calls were sent on Apollo 11, but they were not music, they consisted of news and sports. The songs continued through the Space Shuttle missions but it has been years since there has been a manned NASA mission.NASA’s chief historian, Brian Odom, told NPR that the music is sometimes chosen by the crew at ground control or the families of the astronauts.The three American and one Canadian astronauts on the Artemis II mission are scheduled to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday evening in their Orion spacecraft. On Thursday, the crew will begin preparing the cabin and studying entry procedures ahead of reentry.The trip through the Earth’s atmosphere will be the most dangerous portion of the entire mission.There were concerns about the heat shields on the spacecraft after damage suffered during the 2022 Artemis I test flight. NASA has changed the planned trajectory of the spacecraft for reentry to lessen the time it faces the extreme heat and friction that is most taxing on the heatshields.The new entry method is untested in a live environment but NASA says it is confident in the new reentry method after using computer modeling to test it.

NASA Shares Artemis II Wake-Up Songs in Spotify Playlist

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