Most people have experienced the disorientation of waking up and not knowing where they are.
So, imagine how it must be to open your eyes in a location that rivals anything conjured in a dream: the inside of the tiny Orion capsule where you are a member of an Artemis crew. Oh, and also, the moon outside is disconcertingly large.
No wonder then that, since the earliest days of space travel, careful thought has had to be given to how Mission Control awakens its crews. It also explains why the default alarm on a smartphone, brutal and devoid of anything pleasant, would probably be a bad idea.
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The first known wake-up song played to astronauts was a (Hello Wally, sung by Jack Jones) to the Gemini 6 crew, Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford, in December 1965.
And so a tradition was born. There is now a music played to astronauts spanning decades of the parallel journeys of the space age and modern musical era. Many of the entries are spectacular but cliched songs like Elton John’s Rocket Man, David Bowie’s Space Oddity or Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly With Me.
But some are genuine surprises such as at least two appearances of Hawaiian War Chant, which, in spite of its name, would be surprisingly good to wake up to.
In the months since the world was captivated by Artemis II and its eminently lovable, relatable and inspiringly normal crew, I am still finding myself playing songs from their wake-up playlist, uploaded by .
One is even on high rotation as I walk my dog or do the dishes: In a Daydream by the Freddy Jones Band, which released the song in 1993. The Artemis II crew woke up to it on day three of their mission this year.
“When I wrote ‘In a Daydream,’ I was looking out a window on a rainy day in South Bend, imagining something beautiful,” says band member Marty Lloyd in a note accompanying a newly released of the piece. “Now, decades later, astronauts are listening to the song while looking out their windows at the beauty of space and Earth. It’s surreal how it’s all come full circle.”
I think the reason I enjoy the Artemis II playlist so much is that it says more about the crew as people, than them as astronauts. It was their partners and children, as well as they themselves, who chose the songs, and so classic astronaut hits on previous missions like Gonna Fly Now from the original Rocky and Come Fly With Me do not get a look in.
Instead, we get whimsy and youth and a sense of people who enjoy the same kind of music as us – the kind of regular humans who to work. I think the success of the mission is that the four astronauts made humanity feel like we, too, could be in that capsule.
Artemis II showed not just that we can aspire to great explorations but also that the best human endeavours begin with waking up better.
