On May 31, Voyager 1 will be the guest of honor at what may be the most exclusive concert in history. To mark the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss II, ESA will beam a live performance of "By the Beautiful Blue Danube" to NASA's deep space probe.
When Stanley Kubrick filmed the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, he did what many directors do. During the editing, he used classical library music to fill in for the original score being composed by Alex North. To his pleasant surprise, Kubrick found that the library music worked much better than the planned score, so he kept the pieces in.
One of these was Strauss's "By the Beautiful Blue Danube," which was used during the sequence where the Pan Am space shuttle docks with Space Station V in what has often been called a space ballet. It was a hit with audiences and the soundtrack album for the film won a gold record as it made the 24th spot on the Billboard 200 chart, number two on the Billboard Best Selling Classical LPs chart, and number three on the UK Albums Chart.
It also shot both the Blue Danube and the title theme "Also Sprach Zarathustra" into popular folklore, with the former being dubbed the "unofficial anthem of space."
It also caused a bit of a kerfuffle in 1977 when Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 lifted off on their mission to Jupiter and beyond that would eventually see them leave the solar system, never to return. Bolted to the hull of both spacecraft was a copy of NASA's Golden Record, which was a gold-plated copper LP disc containing images and sounds from the planet Earth as a cosmic postcard to any beings who might find it eons in the future.
It was an ambitious enterprise, but when it came to the music selections the NASA committee opted for eclecticism and a certain ideological puritanism, which meant that entire genres of music were excluded. The inclusion of folk tune selections that would have stumped a music ethnologist meant the Blue Danube didn't make the cut.
Now the Vienna Tourist Board, ESA, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra hope to make some small amends by beaming the waltz to Voyager 1 as part of what is billed as an interstellar live broadcast.
On May 31, 2025 at 12:30 pm PDT (8:30 pm CET) at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra under chief conductor Petr Popelka will perform a series of pieces, with the highlight being the Blue Danube, which will be transmitted in real-time to ESA's Deep Space Antenna DSA 2 in Cebreros, Spain. Then it will be beamed to Voyager 1, which will receive the tune 23 hours and three minutes later, 15.457 billion miles (24.876 billion km) from Earth.
The hour-long event will be livestreamed at space.vienna.info and the Vienna Tourist Board’s Instagram channel @vienna, as well as at the Strandbar Herrmann in Vienna, in Bryant Park near Times Square in New York and directly in front of ESA's 115-ft (35-m) Deep Space Antenna DSA 2 in Cebreros near Madrid.
The space transmission will likely be in the X-band, which is used for most deep-space communications. Though the precision beam will intercept Voyager 1, the robotic spacecraft's 12-ft (3.7 m) high-gain antenna probably won't actually receive the waltz because the onboard receiver may not be compatible and the data transfer rate is much too fast for the '70s-era equipment. That, plus a lot of interstellar noise that Voyager can't filter out on its own means no response is expected.
On the plus side, the transmission is in line with the star AC+79 3888 and may reach it in about 17.137 light-years – assuming, that is, the star hasn't shifted in that time, as they tend to do.
According to the Vienna Tourist Board, the transmission not only marks the 200th birthday of Strauss, but Vienna's “King of Waltz. Queen of Music” themed year, where Straus is the King and Vienna the Queen; the 50th anniversary of ESA; the 20th anniversary of Deep Space Antenna DSA 2; the 50th anniversary of ESA's Estrack Network for deep space tracking; and the 125th anniversary of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
"In 2001: A Space Odyssey, 'On the Beautiful Blue Danube' accompanies the rotation of the space station and the docking of the spaceships," said Jan Nast, Intendant Wiener Symphoniker: 'Genuss symphonischer Musik für weitere Kreise.'" Stanley Kubrick deliberately chose the Danube Waltz to emphasize the grace and poetry of movement in space – a floating ballet in outer space. No other work epitomizes the connection between music and the universe as impressively as Strauss' waltz, as it is regarded as the space anthem. With ‘Waltz into Space’, the Wiener Symphoniker are performing for a potentially extraterrestrial audience for the first time. We are thus remaining true to our founding mission: to make the fascination of symphonic music accessible to an ever wider audience."
Source: Vienna Tourist Board