Astronauts have been making music in orbit for almost 60 years, but at least some of the members of a band called Bandella prefer to think of themselves as musicians who just happened to become astronauts.
“We were musicians before we got into the astronaut corps,” one of the band’s founders, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, told GeekWire.
Bandella’s Seattle concerts, set for Saturday at the Museum of Flight, won’t be your typical summer music tour. The event will feature some space-themed tunes — including David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which went viral when Hadfield recorded a tribute performance on the International Space Station in 2013. There’ll also be a Q&A session during which the musicians recount their experiences in space.
Hadfield said it’s only natural that astronauts bring music with them when they go into orbit. “We’re just people, multifaceted,” he said. “And when you’re a long way from home, you know, you need art and music in amongst all the busyness.”
It’s also natural for astronauts to share their out-of-this-world experiences via the creative channels that they’ve developed throughout their lives.
“A lot of it goes back to when you have been so incredibly lucky to have had the experiences that the members of the band have had. What do you do with those experiences? How do you explain it, and make it part of your own life, and not just a weird perturbation?” Hadfield said.
Those who have seen their home planet from space — including Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos — sometimes talk about a heightened sense of Earth’s beauty and fragility that’s commonly called the Overview Effect. But Hadfield thinks the Overview Effect is “way too confining a definition of what it actually means to us.”
“How are you going to share it with other people?” he asked. “Everybody in the band has a different answer to that question, but that’ll be one of the things, I think, that really makes this performance special.”
Bandella got its start 20 years ago, when Hadfield was going through training at Russia’s Star City complex for future space station missions. Back then, astronauts from NASA as well as the Canadian and European space agencies liked to hang out at an impromptu bar in the basement of one of their housing units.
One night, Hadfield worked up a jam session with Micki Pettit, the wife of NASA astronaut Don Pettit.
“Micki has been a musician and a performer and a disc jockey and a real free spirit her whole life. She’s got a really big, strong torch-song voice. But she also is one of those people who is just an instinctive and beautiful harmony singer,” Hadfield said.
Other musically minded astronauts soon joined the group, including:
- Cady Coleman, who had her own turn in the orbital music spotlight when she performed history’s first orbit-to-ground flute duet with Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson in 2011.
- Steve Robinson, who took on a spacewalk to repair the shuttle Discovery in 2005. “Anything with strings, he can play beautifully,” Hadfield said.
- Dan Burbank, who participated in two space station assembly missions (in 2000 and 2006) and spent more than five months aboard the station as an expedition crew member in 2011-2012. “He’s like an Art Garfunkel kind of guy with that beautiful ability to just make the music fuller with harmonies and occasionally take the lead. And he is a really deft guitar player and bass player as well,” Hadfield said.
- Ken Cockrell, a retired astronaut who’ll be playing the keyboard for the Seattle concerts. “He commanded the space shuttle [for missions in 1996, 2001 and 2002] and was chief astronaut [in 1997-1998], but he’s a keyboards player,” Hadfield said.
“Everybody’s either an experienced spaceflier or, in Micki’s case, the spouse of an experienced spaceflier,” Hadfield said. “So it’s joyful and fun, and there’s a real reunion feel to it.”
Hadfield said it’s not easy to get the band together for their gigs. “You can imagine — I mean, Steve Robinson is a tenured professor working on a huge number of projects at UC-Davis. Micki’s husband is preparing for a spaceflight right now,” he said. “I help run several companies and have three television shows in pre-production, and I’m writing my sixth book. And Cady is just finishing up her book.”
This week’s gig at the Museum of Flight will mark the first time that Bandella has performed in Seattle.
“Part of the reason to play there, obviously, is the venue,” Hadfield said. “It’s not just a random place. When you look at the huge amount of aerospace industry activity in the Seattle area — with Boeing and SpaceX and what’s going on with Blue Origin and all the other companies — there’s a lot of interest up there.”
Not every song that Bandella performs is about outer space, but one of Hadfield’s favorites — “I.S.S.: Is Somebody Singing” — celebrates the International Space Station. And “Space Oddity” is sure to be on the playlist.
“People expect it,” Hadfield said.
At the same time that Bandella is bringing the space experience down to Earth through their music, spacefliers are continuing to bring music with them to the final frontier. In 2021, for example, Seattle-area engineer Chris Sembroski strummed a ukulele aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for a video streamed from orbit.
For his part, Hadfield can’t wait for musical performances to reach even farther frontiers. He noted that astronauts are due to start a series of Artemis missions to the lunar surface in the mid-2020s.
“We are switching now from exploration to settlement, sort of like Antarctica between 1910 and, say, the 1950s or ’60s,” he said. “Once we start having a settlement somewhere in a very new environment, we’re going to bring with us a subset of instruments and a subset of culture including music, and then it’s going to evolve in that new place.”
Perhaps musicians on the moon or on Mars will develop their own distinctive styles, just as Celtic music from Ireland, Scotland and England gave birth to bluegrass in America. “That’ll be a really interesting next step,” Hadfield said. “Imagine when you are doing a tour, it’s no longer just a world tour, you know? Which world? It sounds crazy, but you know, it’s coming faster than everybody thinks.”
Check the Museum of Flight’s website for tickets to Bandella’s concerts, which are set for 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday. But don’t delay: The 6:30 show is already sold out.
