“It epitomises the human spirit”: Brian May’s love song to NASA
Back in the early 1970s, Brian May was a promising young student at Imperial College London, studying for his PhD in astrophysics. Sadly, just as he was on the precipice of finishing his thesis on light reflection through interplanetary dust, a 27-year-old May was called away to play guitar on a full-time basis for an upstart rock n’ roll band called Queen.
The science world’s loss was music’s gain for the next few decades, as May and his bandmates experienced no small amount of success. It was always just a matter of time before Brian’s true calling would bring him back, at long last, into the laboratory.
In 2007, after a delay of a mere 33 years or so, May submitted his completed thesis, titled “A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud”. Suddenly, he was the new rock star of the astronomy world, caught up in a whirlwind of fandom and collaborating with some of the leading minds in the field. May was given an honorary fellowship and the role of chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University in 2008, the same year that an asteroid was named in his honour. By 2015, he’d also become an official member of the science team for NASA’s ‘New Horizons’ mission, exploring the furthest reaches of the solar system.
Yes, there were still distractions along the way, including world tours with a reunited Queen and singer Adam Lambert, plus the obligatory guitar god appearances at various events like the 2012 Olympic Games closing ceremonies etc, etc. In 2018, though, Brian was finally able to put his musicianship toward something more relevant to his actual chosen career, as NASA asked him to write and perform a song to essentially serve as the theme for the next leg of the New Horizons mission, which would send a space probe past Ultima Thule (aka 486958 Arrokoth) in the Kuiper belt out by Pluto—where no man-made object had gone before.
“It was Alan Stern, the project instigator of this amazing NASA mission, who threw down the glove,” May recalled. “He asked if I could come up with a theme for Ultima Thule which could be played as the NH probe reached this new destination. I was inspired by the idea that this is the furthest that the hand of man has ever reached. It will be by far the most distant object we have ever seen at close quarters, through the images which the space craft will beam back to earth. To me, it epitomises the human spirit’s unceasing desire to understand the universe we inhabit.”
And so, out of a deep appreciation for this historic moment, Brian May stepped away from the telescope, picked up his guitar, and penned a love song to NASA with lyrical assistance from Don Black. The resulting anthem, ‘New Horizons’, premiered on New Year’s Day, 2019, at the NASA control centre at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, on the same day that the space probe reached Ultima Thule.
May handles the vocals on ‘New Horizons’ himself, aside from the song’s introduction, which uses sampled audio from physicist Stephen Hawking. The whole song is almost shockingly upbeat and thoroughly optimistic, channelling May’s childhood wonder into a celebration of mankind’s ongoing push forward into the cosmos. Listening to the track, one could almost believe that all those years spent on tour buses and awards stages with Queen just might have been worthwhile for Brian May after all, as he managed to find another way to contribute to the cause of space exploration while also earning a hell of a lot more money and admiration in the process.
As an added bit of positive news, May is recovering and “doing really well” after a stroke this past summer. He plans to pursue more music, astrophysics, and environmental activism in the years to come.
