Astronauts on two separate moon missions have said they experienced something unexpected on the way: strange-sounding “music” coming through their headsets.
Space can inspire awe, but it can also be deeply unsettling—something crews learn quickly once they’re far from Earth.
From the outside, travelling beyond our atmosphere might look like pure adventure. In reality, the unknowns that come with exploration can be genuinely unnerving.
And while scientists continue to search for answers, some of what gets reported from deep space is hard to shake.
A small number of astronauts have described hearing eerie, rhythmic tones while travelling toward the Moon—an especially odd claim given that sound, in the usual sense, shouldn’t be able to travel through space.
That’s because space lacks the air needed to transmit sound waves. It’s close to a vacuum, with too few particles to carry vibrations the way they move through Earth’s atmosphere.
It’s also why astronauts on spacewalks can’t rely on their ears alone to hear one another; they communicate using radio. Inside a pressurised spacecraft, of course, sound works normally.
So how did two different crews, on two different missions, report something that sounded like music while near the Moon?
According to accounts from NASA astronauts, both Apollo 10 and Apollo 11 crews heard unusual “space music” during their journeys.
The first report came from Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan in May 1969, during a rehearsal mission ahead of the first human lunar landing.
Although the audio wasn’t made public for decades, the incident was taken seriously enough that Apollo 11 astronauts were reportedly cautioned about it before their own mission later that year.
On Apollo 10, the sound appeared after the lunar module separated from the main spacecraft, as the crew prepared to orbit the Moon for more than 10 hours.
Following that orbit, they were due to rendezvous and return to the primary module.
But while passing over the far side of the Moon—out of direct contact with Earth—the astronauts heard a whistling-like noise. The recording suggests it was less a tune and more an unsettling, repeating tone.
During the exchange, Cernan asked: “Can you hear that? That whistling sound?”
Stafford replied: “Yes,” to which Cernan echoed the sound: “Whooooo!”
Young then added: “Did you hear that whistling sound, too?”
Cernan said: “Yeah. Sounds like, you know, outer-space-type music.”
After that, the footage and audio reportedly sat largely unnoticed in NASA archives for many years.
Then, ahead of Apollo 11’s launch, the next crew was allegedly advised to expect the same phenomenon.
Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong later encountered a similar sound as well—again around the time the lunar module separated from the command module, with the noise stopping once the module reached the lunar surface.
Collins later described the moment in his book, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, writing: “There is a strange noise in my headset now, an eerie woo-woo sound.”
He added: “Had I not been warned about it, it would have scared the hell out of me.”
NASA has since attributed the strange audio to radio interference, caused by interactions between the VHF radio systems used in the lunar module and the command module.