Space Jams: NASA Joins SoundCloud
(SoundCloud/NASA)
Surely the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is everyone’s favorite government agency, right?
Yet somehow that never seems to translate to an expanded NASA budget or a thrilling new space mission. Well, maybe the agency can use its own storied past to engage the public in a new way — online.
Here, then, is one small step for NASA’s social-media presence: a SoundCloud account.
The agency has uploaded scores of sound snippets to the audio-sharing platform and quickly attracted more than 15,000 followers.
Some classics are here: “Houston, We’ve Had a Problem,” for instance. But I’d recommend the fascinating playlist of “Solar System & Beyond Sounds” (highlighted by Sonic Terrain). This spooky-sounding recording of “Chorus Waves within Earth’s Atmosphere,” for instance, is begging to be worked into a remix. Same with “Cassini: Saturn Radio Emissions #1.”
If you’re more interested in nostalgia-inducing recordings of space-exploration audio documents and rhetoric, there’s a Kennedy highlights reel and the pretty much irresistible Apollo Sounds playlist — a reminder of how iconic sounds can be, from “We have liftoff” to “The Eagle has landed,” to, of course, Neil Armstrong’s famous announcement of “one giant leap for mankind.”
Fun stuff. And if you want something to look at while you listen, try this NASA GIFs Tumblr. It doesn’t seem to be official and doesn’t appear to have been updated in months, but it’s a fairly delightful collection of space-geeky visuals.
If somebody could mash up some of these with a sound track pulled from the agency’s SoundCloud recordings, maybe NASA enthusiasm could go viral again.
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