“Fly me to the moon,
“Let me play among the stars,
“Let me see what spring is like,
“On Jupiter and Mars … ”
Frank Sinatra’s rendition of the Bart Howard classic croon tune was closely tied to the NASA Apollo space program of the ’60s. Today, it still rates number two on NASA’s Third Rock Radio’s Moon Tunes playlist for its return flyby trip to the satellite orb, coming up this weekend.
Not a bad effort. Only behind David Bowie’s Space Oddity and ahead of a constellation of other lunar tunes; REM’s Man on the Moon, EJ’s Rocket Man, Billie Holliday’s Blue Moon, Walking on the Moon, Bad Moon Rising …
No shortage of pop culture Moon links as NASA prepares to blast the manned Artemis II spacewards as a precursor to a manned moon landing reprise and a subsequent crack at Mars.
The whip-around will be the first crewed mission to travel beyond a low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. It will be hooting along at 40,000 km/h when it returns and hits the atmosphere. That’s cooking, the fastest anyone’s ever hooted.
Images: NASA
The auguries seem ok. Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo and ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, a good omen for any slingshot trajectory around the Moon, you’d think.
Triggers loads of nostalgia. I remember watching the Apollo 11 landing, at a Melbourne school run by American teachers. They were pretty amped about things. Heck, everybody was. It had been a good decade in coming, with a staggering array of space-shots, orbits, space-walks, monkeys, dogs, disastrous launches, botched landings and more preceding the event.
Pop songs were only part of it. TV delivered I Dream of Jeannie, The Jetsons, Lost in Space, Star Trek, Thunderbirds, Doctor Who, Land of the Giants, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits. Who can forget It’s About Time with Gronk, Shag, Boss and Klon, and astronauts Mac and Hector?
The allure held tight, of course. Years later, my first news story in this paper was an interview at Deakin with astronaut John Young, Apollo 16 commander and ninth man to step on the Moon. He spent three days there.
He was also on Gemini 3 and 10, the Apollo 10 command module, and went on to command Space Shuttle STS-1 and STS-9. He was beyond cool.
I’m still buzzing. Bit like old travel mate Serge, from Reunion, a parachutist who looked to the back of the aircraft on one jump to see a new club visitor with a familiar face. Neil Armstrong. True.
The Moon landing’s been pure catnip for conspiracy theorists with its fake Moon landing filmed by Stanley Kubrick, lack of a blast crater, lack of stars in photos, non-parallel shadows, its fluttering flag in a windless environment – all claims put to rest time and again, but hey.
So hoax or not, and hopefully without Musk’s size-X boofhead in there anywhere, I’ll be glued to the box/PC/phone keeping tabs on Artemis this weekend.
Might even have Moon Tunes #7, Train’s maternally-inspired Drops of Jupiter, purring away as a background soundscape – would have loved to be watching it all again with my Mum.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 3 February 2026.
