Waltz into Space

'BLUE DANUBE' BEAMED INTO COSMOS'

Today, on May 31st 2025, to celebrate the Austrian composer Johann Strauss's 200th birthday and the European Space Agency's (ESA) 50th, a performance of his famous 'Blue Danube' waltz was sent heading to the stars.

A popular piece of music, often described as the 'unofficial national anthem of Austria', it has also appeared in a number of films from the Titanic to the Jungle Book. And perhaps most fittingly it was also prominently used in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. However when the Voyager probes were launched in 1977 with 'Golden Records' for any Extra Terrestrial species, containing images of life on earth and various iconic sounds (including humpback whales) and music, the Blue Danube was omitted.

Todays' live performance of the Waltz by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra (also celebrating 125 years) is seen as a way of rectifying that. As it was streamed in New York, Madrid and Vienna, a pre-recorded version, whose sound files were already converted to radio waves, began transmission from ESA's antennae in Spain, departing Earth's atmosphere in less than a second!

According to the ESA, travelling at the speed of light, it will take 23 hours to arrive at Voyager 1, the farthest off man-made object still in communication with Earth, more than 25 billion miles away in interstellar space and will continue to travel throughout the universe.