Pink Floyd: "Still First In Space"?

[Spanky_The_Dolphin]

As a casual fan of Pink Floyd (I have ‘Meddle’, ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, ‘Wish You Were Here’, and ‘The Wall’ album and film,) I don’t know everything about their history. I am also the proud owner of a Pink Floyd tee shirt.

The shirt is for ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, and is black, with the prism (from the album cover) on the front with “PINK FLOYD” in blue at the right breast. On the back is the prism, upside-down, with “DARK SIDE OF THE MOON” in blue at the top of the flipped prism.

Okay, sorry for the lengthy discription, now for my main question.

On the back of the shirt, at the neck, is a little picture. It’s a blue line drawing of a space probe (Voyager 1/2, I’m 90% sure of it, but there’s a tiny chance that it might be Pioneer 10) Around the probe are two lines of very small text: “PINK FLOYD/STILL FIRST IN SPACE”

Is there anything behind this statement? I know that “The Sounds Of Earth” disks sent out with the Voyager probes contained a lot of sounds, speeches, language examples, and music. Was Pink Floyd included on these disks?

The only thing I can find concerning what the songs were are some statements that it ranged from Beethoven to “Great Balls Of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis.

So, to sum it all up: is Pink Floyd “still first in space”?

BTW: This is my first post here, but I’ve been a reader/lurker for about a month.

[sir_viks]

No Pink Floyd, but song list from Voyager’s “Sounds of Earth” can be found here:

http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/music.html

Perhaps this is just the first of two records, as there were two Voyagers?

[Spanky_The_Dolphin]

To the best of my knowledge, both Voyagers carried identical recordings.

[evilhanz]

From PINK FLOYD The Visual Documentary by Miles and Andy Mabbett (1994):

“November 26, 1988 Pink Floyd lived up to the slogan on one of their 1987 tour T-shirts and became ‘the first band in space’ when Cosmonauts on Soyez 7 took a cassette copy of ‘Delicate Sound Of Thunder’ (without the case, to reduce weight) to the MIR space station. David Gilmour and Nick Mason flew to Bajkonur to see the launch. Mason: ‘When you see one of these things launch, it’s just extraordinary. Apart from the hush that falls on the crowd watching, the air just vibrates with the power of the ignited rocket motors.’ Gilmour added… ‘To say that we are thrilled at the thought of being the first rock band to be played in space is something of an understatement.’ The sound of the rocket taking off was recorded for possible use on a future Pink Floyd Album. At the end of their 30 day duty, the cosmonauts left the tape aboard the MIR space station for the enjoyment of subsequent visitors.”

[evilhanz]

Here’s some more info from a thread over on Deja:

The Floyd were saddled with the ‘space music’ tag as early as 1968, playing sci-fi conventions and eventually having their music used for the European coverage of the moon landing (for Nick Mason’s views on this, see Nicholas Scaffner’s A Saucerful Of Pink page 136).

The following is excerpted from Pink Floyd - The Inside Story (David Fricke - Rolling Stone 19.11.87):

(Waters) scoffs at the ‘space music’ tag frequently applied to the Floyd records of that period ('70s). “The space thing was a joke,” he says. “None of those pieces were about outer space. They were about inner space. That’s all it’s ever been about – human beings and their insides…”

[Spanky_The_Dolphin]

Damn, I was hoping for something more exciting than that.

Oh well, at least I know now.

Thanks.