Vienna, Austria: To celebrate the 200th anniversary of Johann Strauss’s birth and mark the 50th year of the European Space Agency (ESA), Strauss’s celebrated waltz, The Blue Danube, will be broadcast into space.
The performance by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra is scheduled for May 31 and will be live-streamed with free public screenings in Vienna, Madrid, and New York.
To prevent technical difficulties during the broadcast, a pre-recorded version from the orchestra’s rehearsal the day before will be transmitted, while a live performance will accompany it.
🎉 We’re celebrating our 50th birthday on 30 May! For half a century, we’ve been serving Europe, inspiring its citizens and exploring the cosmos. Check out our #50YearsOfESA web site for stories, archive images and details of events coming up in the year.… pic.twitter.com/0HzJVXnpJK
— European Space Agency (@esa) May 1, 2025
The transmission will originate from ESA’s large deep-space antenna dish in Spain. The Classical music will pass the moon in just 1.5 seconds, reach Mars in 4.5 minutes, Jupiter in 37 minutes, and Neptune within four hours.
If the transmission proceeds as planned, it will reach NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, currently the most distant human-made object, over 15 billion miles away in interstellar space, within 23 hours.
Tourism officials in Vienna, Strauss’s birthplace in October 1825, stated that sending The Blue Danube, considered the ‘most famous of all waltzes,’ into space corrects a ‘cosmic mistake’ as Strauss’s music was left out of previous interstellar transmissions.
NASA’s space broadcast
Nearly 50 years ago, NASA’s Voyager Golden Records included a selection of Earth’s sounds and music, featuring classical composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, as well as modern and Indigenous music. These gold-plated copper phonograph records were attached to Voyager 1 and 2, but Strauss was notably omitted.
In past musical space tributes, NASA celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008 by beaming The Beatles’ Across The Universe into deep space, and just last year, transmitted Missy Elliott’s The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) toward Venus. This upcoming broadcast continues the tradition of sharing Earth’s cultural heritage with the cosmos through music.
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