For the first time since 1972, an American lander called Odysseus has touched down on the Moon.
The private spacecraft contains a time capsule made from a glass, nickel and NanoFiche structure built to survive for millions, if not billions, of years.
Uploaded onto its memory are historic artistic artefacts including Michael P Nash’s 2010 documentary Climate Refugees and paintings by Rembrandt and Van Gogh.
Alongside these are 25,000 digitised songs by stars like Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Santana, Chuck Berry, Bob Marley, Janis Joplin and more.
Photos of events like Woodstock and album work like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon are also included.
There are even songs that have never been released in this time capsule, says Dallas Santana, the founder of Space Blue who pitched sending 222 musicians to the Moon to the Arch Mission Foundation.
Artists from 1969 and those who played Woodstock are the focus of the curated collection given it was the year that man first set foot on the Moon.
According to Billboard, he said: “In case we blow ourselves up with a nuclear weapon or a meteor hits us or climatic change wipes us out, there’s a testament of our history sitting on the moon.”
Santana had kept the names of musicians whose music had been sent to the Moon secret until now.
He added: “NASA doesn’t know – SpaceX doesn’t know yet,” he says. “Elon Musk is the greatest rocketeer of all time, we’re grateful for his company. When we decided to have conversations about musicians last year, we thought it was not appropriate to bring to it to his attention what we were going to do. And musicians were concerned about that.
“They said, ‘Does Elon Musk have anything to do with deciding what musicians go up there?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely not, this is a private payload.’”
