Strauss’ ‘Blue Danube’ waltz has been sent to space... and The Simpsons already predicted it

5 June 2025, 14:30

The Vienna Symphony Orchestra has broadcast Strauss II’s famous waltz ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’ into space, in celebration of the composer’s 200th anniversary.

Johann Strauss II’s most famous piece, ‘The Beautiful Blue Danube’, has finally found its place amongst the stars after the Vienna Symphony Orchestra broadcast their live performance of the beloved waltz into outer space.

And, like many historic milestones before it, Strauss’ intergalactic adventures have been eerily predicted by an episode of The Simpsons. In a 1994 season 5 episode titled ‘Deep Space Homer’, the yellow-hued family patriarch smuggles a bag of crinkle-cut crisps into space. Once opened, the potato slices disperse in the weightlessness of the spaceship, and Homer attempts to eat them all to the rhythm of Strauss II’s waltz before they can interfere with the equipment.

Back on planet Earth in the year 2025, organisers of the project titled Waltz into Space have said they are trying to ‘right a cosmic wrong’. Johann Strauss II was overlooked in 1977, when Carl Sagan and his team compiled a selection of classical music to be sent to space on golden records aboard the twin Voyager space probes.

Now, almost half a century later, Strauss II joins his fellow musicians-turned-space explorers J.S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky in the sky.

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From its performance in Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts on Saturday 31 June, the recording was sent directly to the European Space Agency’s deep space antenna near Cebreros, Spain, which then transmitted the spacebound signal out into the atmosphere and far, far beyond.

From its earthly beginnings, the signal travelled at the speed of light into space. It took just 1.28 seconds for the electromagnetic wave to reach the moon, 37 minutes to get to Jupiter, and four hours to arrive at Neptune.

Finally, 23 hours and three minutes after the Vienna Symphony’s performance, the signal passed the furthest manufactured object in space: the Voyager 1 vessel, over 15 billion miles away.

The Blue Danube is broadcast live into space from Vienna

This isn’t the universe’s first encounter of the musical kind. From maestro Seiji Ozawa’s live Beethoven broadcast to astronaut Sarah Gillis’ Star Wars violin solo mid-orbit, the worlds of music and space exploration have never been more closely linked.

The interdisciplinary partnership is a familiar one to Director General of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, as well.

“In space, we use music quite deliberately,” he told Classic FM. “Sometimes, when you have really difficult problems to solve – which happens a lot in space technology – we need to stick our heads together and see how we can solve it.

“We have engineers from all countries in the European Space Agency. They’re quite different in nature. They use different languages, they have different ways of thinking. And sometimes music really inspires them.”

He recalls hearing Strauss II’s music in particular ringing out from ESA engineers’ workstations as they grapple with particularly fiendish dilemmas.

He continued: “[Music] puts your mind at ease. It transports your thoughts into outer space, literally, and helps you to sometimes take a distance from the engineering problem and look at it from a different perspective.”