Strauss Monument in Vienna – CC 4.0. By-SA, Greywoodsurrey

You’ve heard the famous “Blue Danube” waltz—even if the name doesn’t ring any bells. Trust us on this one.

Composed by the Austrian “Waltz King” Johann Strauss II, it has been borrowed for every kind of media imaginable, from commercials to Looney Tunes shorts.

Today in Europe, and interesting confluence will occur when the Waltz King’s 200th Birthday will coincide with that of the European Space Agency’s 50th.

Embodying the often playful nature of humanity’s relation with space and our exploration of it, “Blue Danube” will be beamed into space via the Vienna Symphony Orchestra tomorrow, May 31st.

ESA is taking a leaf out of NASA’s playbook this time, as the American equivalent also celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2008 by transmitting a song directly into deep space: the Beatles’ “Across the Universe.”

The live performance, which will be livestreamed in public in New York City, Madrid, and Vienna, Strauss’ birthplace, will be an accompaniment to the actual radio transmission—recorded today to avoid technical issues in converting sound files to radio waves. Both the live performance and the transmission though will happen simultaneously.

Or rather, they will begin simultaneously, because once the ESA controllers hit play, “Blue Danube” will depart Earth’s atmosphere in less than a second, and be passing Mars long before the musicians lower their bows and brass.

It will take 23 hours to arrive at Voyager 1, the farthest off man-made object still in communication with Earth, more than 15 billion miles away in interstellar space.

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Following its inception, ESA collaborated with NASA on the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE), the world’s first high-orbit telescope, which was launched in 1978 and operated successfully for 18 years.

A number of successful Earth-orbit projects followed, and in 1986 ESA began Giotto, its first deep-space mission, to study the comets Halley and Grigg–Skjellerup. Hipparcos, a star-mapping mission, was launched in 1989 and in the 1990s SOHO, Ulysses and the Hubble Space Telescope were all jointly carried out with NASA.

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ESA’s most recent and grandest achievements have been their key collaboration with the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Cassini space probe, again with NASA’s help, which went to explore the moons of Saturn, providing the best data and images collected of these mysterious bodies.

The founding member states included, Belgium, Denmark, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, but has since grown to include all of Western Europe, including Austria, Strauss’ home country.

Livestreams are available on the Waltz into Space website, here. 

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