100 Weird Objects Sent Into Space
From a corned beef sandwich, to Yankee Stadium dirt, to sea urchin sperm, here are some of the weirdest things humans have put into space.
The song Across the Universe by The Beatles
Lego mini-figurines of Galileo and the Roman deities Jupiter and Juno
A sound recording of a kiss between a mother and child
Luke Skywalker’s Lightsaber (a prop from 1983 went up in 2007 with Discovery shuttle-flight mission STS-120)
A color photograph of the city of Oxford
Melancholy Blues, performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven
A black and white diagram of human sex organs
Nascar starter flags (green)
JS Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No2 conducted by Karl Richter
Australia Morning Star and Devil Bird Aboriginal songs
A sound recording of a shepherd herding sheep
Johnny B Goode by Chuck Berry
Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by blues musician Blind Willie Johnson
Buzz Lightyear toy. The astronaut action figure of the Toy Story films went in 2008 with Discovery mission STS-124
A sound recording of the rain
A color photograph of Snowflakes over Sequoia
A color photograph of a tree with daffodils
Dirt from the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium (taken by astronaut and Yankees fan Garret Reisman in 2008).
A piece of the rudimentary airplane the Wright brothers flew in 1903, when the aircraft came a few feet off of the ground
Two golden orb spiders, named Gladys and Esmerelda, were housed on the International Space Station in 2011
Lots of dead space monkeys, many called Albert
Andy Warhol’s drawing of a penis, included on a small ceramic tile carried on Apollo 12
Claus Oldenberg’s drawing of Mickey Mouse
The Fallen Astronaut, a small figurine by Belgian artist Paul Van Hoeydonk
An interactive video performance called ARTSAT from Austrian artist Richard Kriesche
Small bits of bone and eggshell from the duck-billed dinosaur Maiasaura peeblesorum, sent on SpaceLab2 in 1985
A saxophone
Holograms and cubes made from water samples from some of the world’s major rivers, part of the Lowry Burgess’s Boundless Cubic Lunar Aperture project
Arthur Woods’s Cosmic Dancer, an aluminium sculpture painted with acrylics
A watercolour by Elizabeth Carroll Smith called When Dreams are Born
Primsa, a sculpture by artist Pierre Comte that consists of 14 small painted spheres each 2.5 cm in diameter with seven limbs extending from its axis
Two art prints by the German artist Michael Böhme
A piece of music composed by Blur
A DVD called Monochrome (for Mars) by Australian artist Stephen Little
A portion of the remains of space physicist Gerard K O’Neill (1927–1992)
A sound recording of an F-111 flyby
A portion of the remains of Krafft Ehricke (1917–1984), rocket scientist
The 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still was beamed to Alpha Centauri in 2008
25,800 text messages from Australians, in a 2009 project called Hello From Earth, sent to Gliese 581
100,000 Craigslist advertisements, including ‘Free kittens to a good home’
A corned beef sandwich from a Cocoa Beach, Florida deli, taken by John Young in 1965. It disintegrated in the low gravity
Sea urchin sperm
Senegalese percussion recorded by Charles Duvelle
A sound recording of a ship’s horn
A football (the Americans sent it into space called “a soccer ball”)
Two sets of coins commemorating Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, aboard the space shuttle Atlantis for a 2007 mission.
A giant 3D printer
A sound recording of a blacksmith working
A printed message, written in 1977, from President Jimmy Carter
Lots and lots of vomit bags
Four cans of Pepsi and four cans of Coke, which were on board the Challenger in 1985
Pizza Hut paid nearly £750,000 in 2000 to become the first company to deliver pizza in space – to Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachov
New Guinea Men’s house song by Robert MacLennan
The remains of Clyde Tombaugh, the scientist who discovered Pluto
Gavotte en rondeau from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin
A sound recording of ocean waves breaking, on 12-inch gold-plated copper discs
A Cargo Tag from Jamestown, found by archaeologists researching the colony
The ashes of Star Trek’s James Doohan, who played Scotty on the original television series
Up In The Air, a pop single from actor Jared Leto’s band 30 Seconds To Mars.
A sound recording of “a tame dog”
A recording of El Cascabel, in a mariachi interpretation by Antonio Maciel y Las Aguilillas, composed by Mexico’s Lorenzo Barcelata
An hour long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan
Japanese flute player Goro Yamaguchi playing Tsuru No Sugomori (Crane’s Nest)
A golf ball hit on the moon by Apollo 14 mission astronaut Alan Shepard. He sent it 200 yards (182.9 meters) in zero-gravity
A set of mud pots
The sound recording of Morse Code
A Le Brouere cheese wheel (to honour the Monty Python’s Flying Circus cheese shop sketch)
A film poster from the 1984 Val Kilmer movie Top Secret!
The X-Ray of a hand
A copy of Ruhnama (The Book of the Soul), written by Saparmurat Niyazov, who was President of Turkmenistan from 1990 to 2006
A sound recording of laughter
A colour diagram of DNA structure
A photograph of the Sydney Opera House
A sound recording of a tractor
A Chosen Bun burger and chips meal (didn’t reach outer space)
A Doritos commercial was sent 42 light years away to a star system called 47 Ursae Majoris, which is part of the Big Dipper.
The skull of a meat-eating Coelophysis from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History
A sound recording of a heartbeat
Charles Duke’s family photograph, which was left on the ground at the moon. He was the lunar module pilot for Apollo 16
A sound recording of a horse and cart
A greeting in Korean from Soon Hee Shin, saying “Please be well.”
Tardigrades, or ‘water bears’, microscopic eight-legged creatures that can survive extreme temperatures
A sample of salmonella, aboard the space shuttle Atlantis in 2007 by Arizona State University. The bacteria became even more virulent in space
A sound recording of a hyena
The watch and a scarf owned by celebrated aviator Amelia Earhart
A sound recording of a steam train
A tandoori lamb chop. Sent in November 2014 by author Nikesh Shukla to promote his book Meatscape. The chop was attached to a fork.
HeLa cells, which are named for Henrietta Lacks, a cancer patient in the Fifties from whom they were sampled
A copy of Playboy Magazine, taken by a member of the backup crew of Apollo 12 in 1967
A vial of communion wine and communion bread, taken by astronaut Buzz Aldrin
A triple barrel TP-82 capable of 40 gauge shotgun rounds, taken by Soviet cosmonauts in 1965
Music of the Spheres, Johannes Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi played by Laurie Spiegel
A sound recording of thunder
A sound recording of a someone sawing wood
Peruvian traditional panpipes and drums, courtesy of Casa de la Cultura
Beethoven’s Symphony No 5, First Movement, played by The Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer
A sound recording of crickets
A sound recording of Saturn V Lift-off
The ashes of Gene Roddenberry, the man who created Star Trek, who had his remains shot into space in 1997
A greeting in Zulu from Fred Dube, telling aliens: “We greet you, great ones. We wish you longevity.”
{Source: Martin Chilton, The Telegraph (2016)}