Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Music of the celestial night

Sarah Brightman will pay a whopping $52M to become the eighth space tourist to ride a Russian rocket to the ISS.  She's not talking much about what she'll do there, but I assume she'll try to work out arrangements to provide some kind of live performance and recording. It'll all have to be done with the onsite equipment, though: professional-quality mikes, recording equipment, and so forth are not the kind of thing space tourists can bring. They are limited to personal essentials.  Also, they can't disrupt the operations of the science station. Finally, the acoustics in a metal can crammed with equipment are nothing to sing home about. Still, I hope she can arrange something to encourage support for space exploration and interest in the ISS mission. She's a marvelous singer (Andrew Lloyd Webber described her as having a pop voice with an operatic range) and has been working to arrange this since 2012, so it's not a flirtation she's likely to abandon. 

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