30 Seconds to Mars launches song with gravity-free spin on ISS

March 18, 2013

Rock band 30 Seconds to Mars has launched its new single, “Up in the Air,” in a memorable way — they sent a CD to the International Space Station.  On Monday, they got to watch their CD spinning weightlessly through the air on the ISS.

“That’s a moment that we’ll never forget right there,” said frontman Jared Leto. “Thank you so much for spinning that around.”

Leto and Mars bandmates Shannon Leto (Jared’s brother) and Tomo Milicevic were at Mission Control in Houston on Monday, where they were piped in to the ISS and spoke with U.S. astronaut Tom Marshburn.  The band’s single is released Tuesday, and their new album, “Love Lust Faith + Dreams,” will be out May 21.

“Do you ever listen to music up there?” Jared Leto asked Marshburn.

“I do, during workouts,” he said and noted that the space station’s Canadian commander, Chris Hadfield, is a musician and had been playing and recording music at the station. “Music is a very much a part of our lives up here.”

Besides Hadfield and Marshburn, the space station’s Expedition 35 crew includes Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko. The three men began their space station duty in December and are set to return home in May.  In the video above Marshburn describes a typical day at the space station.

Leto asked Marshburn about his most memorable moments in space and aboard the ISS.

“There are two … 20 years from now I’ll still be thinking about,” Marshburn said. “One was my last few seconds on my spacewalk.” Marshburn had been on his way to the space station, he said, when he went on the space walk. “Looking down between my feet at Earth,” he said, “that was a spectacularly beautiful moment. I didn’t know if it would be the last spacewalk I’d ever do and as it turns out it probably was.” He said he’d also remember looking down on a lightning storm from above.  He and colleagues watched “the greens and blues and yellow and oranges in the lightning…. It was just breathtaking.”

He said he’d also remember the beauty from his perch in space of the aurora borealis and a shooting star.

Leto passed on a question from a Twitter user: If you could live in space or on Earth, which would it be?

“I spent my whole life being curious about space,” he said, “but as wonderful as it is up here … we look back at the Earth and we fall in love with the Earth again.”

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