The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of NASA’s Interstellar Mixtape, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of NASA’s Interstellar Mixtape, by Jonathan Scott, available from Bloomsbury here.

Published: 17-09-2020 Format: Paperback
Edition: 1st | ISBN: 9781472956101

Have you ever made someone you love a mix-tape?

Forty years ago, a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important compilation ever conceived. It wasn’t from one person to another, it was from Earth to the Cosmos.

In 1977 NASA sent Voyager 1 and 2 on a Grand Tour of the outer planets. During the design phase of the Voyager mission, it was realised that this pair of plucky probes would eventually leave our solar system to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

With this gloomy-sounding outcome in mind, NASA decided to do something optimistic. They commissioned astronomer Carl Sagan to create a message to be fixed to the side of Voyager 1 and 2 – a plaque, a calling card, a handshake to any passing alien that might one day chance upon them.

The result was the Voyager Golden Record, a genre-hopping multi-media metal LP. A 90-minute playlist of music from across the globe, a sound essay of life on Earth, spoken greetings in multiple languages and more than 100 photographs and diagrams, all painstakingly chosen by Sagan and his team to create an aliens’ guide to Earthlings.

The record included music by J.S. Bach and Chuck Berry, a message of peace from US president Jimmy Carter, facts, figures and dimensions, all encased in a golden box.

The Vinyl Frontier tells the story of NASA’s interstellar mix-tape, from first phone call to final launch, when Voyager 1 and 2 left our planet bearing their hopeful message from the Summer of ’77 to a distant future.

The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of NASA’s Interstellar Mixtape, reviewed

Firstly this is a great title for a book. Yes it’s a terrible pun, but it works too, and it gave us a kick each time we picked it up to read it. The Voyager probes remain in the news too as it still(!)  40+ years later, continues to send back amazing and fascinating data about what they are seeing as they hurtle beyond our universe.

Overall the Voyager stories are an amazing one to tell, and in many ways it is the gift that keeps giving, more than five decades later. As always the computing power that they had in the sixties and seventies is a thumbnail’s worth compared to what any phone in our pocket today is now capable of doing. Despite this these seventies space missions continue to educate, inform and even excite us with their discoveries so many years later.

In any exercise like this, it is always going to be potentially arbitrary which songs got picked, and which didn’t. Jonathan Scott certainly enjoys riffing on the aesthetics of making a good or bad mix tape, and you certainly get a dose of his own personal history in this book too.

For the most part he is an amiable and pleasant narrator as he guides us through the story. In some parts, the asides and imagined conversations feel a little unnecessary, and he also faced the challenge that he was following a path and a story that has been told before. At the same time it is such a great story that a retelling of it is better than people not being aware of the wider Voyager context. It also captures a slice of the creativity and appeal to dream big that we surely need to hold onto.

Scott also does a good job of capturing the quirks and idiosyncracies that slipped into the final product too, including welcoming speeches by Nazis, affairs breaking out, wrongly captioned pictures, and upside down wasps among others.

It is a success as a popular science book and if it inspires a new generation to look upward and aim for the stars then it has succeeded. The fact that it is now trivially easy to hear what was selected is also a wonderful element of the times we live in now, and will hopefully ensure that humanity continues to aim high and focus on the best, rather than the worst, that it has to offer.

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