Pretend You’re an Astronaut and Wake Up To Shatner

Unless you have a very specific interest in space program journalism, the NASA news feed is usually on the dry side–headlines like “Crew wraps up flight” or “Guy you never heard of just left his job.” But Monday when I got the NASA email, I got Captain Kirk, because the Discovery crew got to wake up to a special edition of the Star Trek theme song. At 3:23 a.m.!

NASA held a song contest before this final Discovery mission. The top two winners were to be used for crew wake-up calls. The Stark Trek theme won second place, behind “Blue Sky” by Big Head Todd and the Monsters. You can see all the results of the voting. I like to think Star Trek won third place as well, since Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” was the song playing when Zefram Cochrane took the world’s first warp drive flight.

For the Discovery crew’s wake-up call, Shatner replaced the usual famous theme song’s voice over with, “Space, the final frontier. These have been the voyages of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Her 30 year mission: To seek out new science. To build new outposts. To bring nations together on the final frontier. To boldly go, and do, what no spacecraft has done before.”

If you’d like to wake up to Shatner, too (3:23 a.m. optional), you can download the sound file at http://www.archive.org/details/STS-133 under the name 03-07-11_STS-133_FD12_Crew_Wakeup (mp3 or wav). Today’s selection, “Blue Sky,” the contest winner, was broadcast on NASA’s live feed at 2:23 a.m. CST.