But it was really the mundane stuff of every day. And it’s not the stuff of the heroic missions that we always think of. In other words, what it meant to build something like the interior of Skylab as a kind of house that would be different from a regular spacecraft.Īnd when I was researching that material, I started encountering a lot of archival stuff– old industrial films, archival audio. And at the time, I was looking at how artists and architects were collaborating with engineers at NASA to design for space. And at the time, when I was finishing my doctorate, I was working as a fellow at the National Air and Space Museum. JAMES MERLE THOMAS: Well, to tell that story is to go back to about 2011, 2012. What was the light bulb in your head? Why did this NASA material make sense to you guys? IRA FLATOW: James, you both have been trying to collaborate on a project together for a while. James Merle Thomas is a musician and art historian based out of Philadelphia. Mikael Jorgensen, when he’s not exploring the bleeps and pings of NASA, is keyboardist for the band Wilko.

Please welcome the member of the musical group Quindar, and their new album is called Hip Mobility. Quindar tones, named after the company that made the equipment, were so ubiquitous during the ’60s Space Race to the moon, and right into the shuttle program, that my next guest took inspiration from them as they combed through NASA’s audio archives all in a quest to make an album– a soundtrack– telling the story of spaceflight. Those tones are created by Ground Control to turn on and off the radio transmitters used to talk to astronauts. They’re almost as iconic as Neil Armstrong’s, “The Eagle has landed” quote. IRA FLATOW: Remember those little beeps in the background? They are quindar tones. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. You may not know what a quindar is, but you have definitely heard one.

Zero cold war soundtrack