Jack White sent a playing record into space at 18 miles high

Jack White sent a playing record

Jack White sent a playing record a device that is capable of playing a record at the time it is in flight. It launched earlier successfully into space and rocker Jack White is the man behind the project shares the results.

White’s record label, Third Man Records successfully launched the Icarus Craft some 94,000 feet just shy of 18 miles above the earth. The whole time, the craft successfully plays a vinyl record, a recording of Carl Sagan’s is “A Glorious Dawn.”

The craft was designed by the label’s electronics consultant Kevin Carrico was launched according to the label on July 2 outside of Idaho, Marsing. Carrico assisted by members of SATINS as Students and Teachers in Near Space.

The label released both a short version as posted below of the event as well as the full, nearly two-hour version.

According to a statement by the label on the YouTube video of the event:

The goal of our mission was to send a vinyl record up as high as possible and document it being played there. Near space (our ultimate destination) is a regular destination for NASA (it’s the closest we come to mimicking the atmosphere of Mars, so it is traveled to often for tests), but our mission was made complex by the fact that we weren’t simply flying a stationary object, but a turntable that we wanted to work — and work well! — so the endeavor became more of a professional high altitude flight than one might expect.

Logically, NASA and other space agencies define space as it starts about 62 miles above the Earth.
During the bumpy return to Earth for how the record is managed to keep on playing?

Once the return to Earth began (with the craft attached to a parachute and falling about 4x faster than it rose), the turntable automatically went into “turbulence mode,” where the record continued to spin, but the tone arm was triggered to lift from the record surface and stay in its locked position, to protect both the needle and the record itself. When Icarus reached the ground — a vineyard, to be exact — the record still spun, unfazed by its incredible journey.

Several decades ago, as Sagan himself was involved in something similar then this sounds familiar. In the 1970s, Sagan led a committee who chose songs, sounds and some other materials to be embedded in a gold record as that was placed onboard both Voyager spacecraft.

Among the recordings on that record were a greeting that is read in 55 different languages, pieces by Stravinsky and Bach, the song “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and dozens of images.

In 2012, The project was on White’s radar for years, as the label revealed in a tweet that shows the musician chatting with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.