Here’s what Kapp said Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins asked him to provide for the Apollo 11 mission - a taste of their Astro Mix Tapes, as Vanity Fair dubs the recordings. But they could also use the cassette players for entertainment. The idea was so that they could log mission notes more easily than scribbling onto paper. NASA began equipping astronauts with small Sony TC-50 cassette recorders - similar to the portable stereo Walkman, which would hit the world in 1979 - for the Apollo 7 mission in October 1968. The audio cassette was still a relatively new format 50 years ago when popular music was defined by the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Simon & Garfunkel, but its compact size - smaller than the portable 8-track tape cartridge - made it an ideal sound vessel for space travel. They wanted to hear their favourite tunes. He was chosen to compile the songs onto cassettes the astronauts said they wanted to hear en route to and from the moon. Vanity Fair tracked down the man behind the primitive playlists -we’d call them “mixtapes,” but even that term didn’t seem part of the pop culture lexicon until the 1980s.Īccording to Vanity Fair, Mickey Kapp, son of the founder of Kapp Records, was pals with some of the astronauts. (Nothing against Elton or the Police, but their spacey tunes were still light years away.) 1 on the national music charts throughout July 1969, the week man flew to, and first walked, on the moon.īut only one of those songs actually was played by Apollo 11’s astronauts on their moon mission. Naturally, that means Elton John’s ‘Rocket Man’, David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, the Police’s ‘Walking on the Moon’, Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and Zager & Evans’s trippy ‘In the Year 2525’ -which was actually No.
These are filled with the usual suspects that mention the moon or are about space flight. Long before playlists were a thing, the astronauts aboard Apollo 11 chose their favourite tunes to listen to on the space flight and for their historic moon walk.Īs the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins’ moon landing on July 20, 1969, approaches, it seems everyone is suggesting a moon-oriented Spotify playlist.
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