The curator of a billion-year time capsule that landed on the Moon last week said it contained an unheard Jimi Hendrix song, along with music by Elvis Presley, The Who and many others.
A total of 222 items were included in the Lunar Records collection, which is part of an archive built into the commercial Odysseus lander that touched down on Feb. 22. The $118 billion vehicle toppled onto its side on arrival but continues to return information to Earth.
Space Blue executive Dallas Santana, who came up with the time capsule idea, told Billboard that the 50,000 songs also include music by Marvin Gaye, Santana, Chuck Berry, Sly & the Family Stone, Bob Marley and Janis Joplin, along with a series of artifacts from 1969 – the year the first humans landed on the moon, and also the year of Woodstock.
“Songs that have never been released, ever – they’re on the Moon now,” Santana said, hinting that the Hendrix piece was from the time before he formed the Jimi Hendrix Experience. “The world will find out about them.”
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He stressed that Elon Musk, the boss of SpaceX – which provided the launch vehicle – wasn’t consulted on the archive’s contents. “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.”
Time Capsule Curator Wanted to Send Summer of Love to the Moon
Touching on how NASA’s original moonshot program coincided with the rise of the hippie movement, Santana said: “We need peace on the Earth right now. We’ve brought to the Moon the Summer of Love, the people and artists and messages that are needed on Earth right now.”
An ancient Sumerian cuneiform fragment, paintings by Rembrandt and Van Gogh, and the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon are also preserved in the capsule, which is built to withstand lunar conditions for up to a billion years.
Also present is the acclaimed 2010 documentary Climate Refugees. Its director, Michael P. Nash, 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.”
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