The European Space Agency (ESA) has made history by transmitting a live performance of The Blue Danube waltz into space — a symbolic cultural moment marking the 200th anniversary of composer Johann Strauss II and ESA’s own 50th birthday.

On 31 May 2025, a performance by the Wiener Symphoniker, conducted by Petr Popelka at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, was broadcast into space from ESA’s Cebreros Deep Space antenna near Madrid.

Travelling at the speed of light, the signal reached and passed Voyager 1 – the farthest human-made object – less than 24 hours later.

The broadcast served to correct what some Strauss fans regard as a long-standing omission. When NASA launched its Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1977 with its famous ‘Golden Record’ – a time capsule of Earth’s culture curated by Dr Carl Sagan – The Blue Danube, widely regarded as the unofficial anthem of space (thanks to its inclusion in an iconic sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey), was not among the 27 musical tracks included.

ESA collaborated with the Vienna Tourist Board to send the iconic waltz “where it rightfully belongs” — into...