Music-loving satellites and extraterrestrials rejoice: Jack White’s Third Man Records is planning to send a “space-proof†turntable your way. In honor of the independent label’s 3-millionth record pressed, White and Co. are launching their custom-made phonographic record player, the Icarus Craft, up into the stratosphere using a high-altitude balloon on July 30. For the occasion, the player is spinning a gold-plated 12-inch master of “A Glorious Dawn,†an arrangement of sound bites from astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan’s Cosmos PBS series. (Although we would’ve been totally cool with anything from White Blood Cells.) Yay, science!
Update, July 31: A seven-nation army couldn’t hold Jack White back from achieving his space dreams. White and Third Man Records were successful in their attempt to play the first phonographic record in space, which occurred just outside of Marsing, Idaho, yesterday afternoon. After flying for an hour and 21 minutes, at a maximum altitude of around 94,000 feet — during which “A Glorious Dawn†was played on repeat the entire time — the Icarus Craft safely landed again on Earth. “Our main goal from inception to completion of this project was to inject imagination and inspiration into the daily discourse of music- and vinyl-lovers,†White said. “Combining our creative impulses with those of discovery and science is our passion, and even on the scale that we are working with here, it was exhilarating to decide to do something that hadn’t been done before and to work toward its completion.†Here’s to next time, Jack …