This is a musical cassette tape that belonged to NASA astronaut and Lunar Module Pilot Rusty Schweickart, who took it with him aboard Apollo 9 – a 10-day orbital mission that served as the first crewed flight test of the lunar landing hardware.
That same lunar landing hardware would carry Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Lunar surface on Apollo 11, later that same year. The cassette contains music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, specifically “Hodie” (subtitled A Christmas Cantata), one of the composer’s most acclaimed works.
Above Video: This is the complete rendition of “Hodie” (subtitled A Christmas Cantata), one of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’s most acclaimed works.
History Speedrun: Rusty Schweickart + Apollo 9
Russell Louis “Rusty” Schweickart was born on October the 25th, 1935, in Neptune Township, New Jersey, and grew up on a 45 acre farm growing hay and vegetables, as well as some chickens and cows. He spent his childhood near Lakehurst Naval Air Station, and by the age of six he could identify most of the warplanes flying overhead by sight – it would be that early fixation that set the direction of his career.
After graduating from Manasquan High School in 1952, Schweickart attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on a scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering in 1956. He then served as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force and the Massachusetts Air National Guard’s 101st Tactical Fighter Squadron from 1956 to 1963, accumulating more than 4,000 hours of flight time, 3,500 of them in high-performance jets.
That service overlapped with a return to MIT for graduate studies in 1959. He earned a Master of Science degree in aeronautics and astronautics in 1963 with a thesis on stratospheric radiance, and worked as a research scientist at MIT’s Experimental Astronomy Laboratory on upper-atmospheric physics and star tracking.
NASA selected Schweickart in October of 1963 as one of 14 members of its third astronaut group. He was the youngest in the class. His first crew assignment came in March of 1966, when he was named backup Pilot for Roger Chaffee on Apollo 1, alongside backup Command Pilot James McDivitt and backup Senior Pilot David Scott.
In December of 1966 the same three men were reassigned as the prime crew for the first crewed Earth-orbital test of the Lunar Module, with Schweickart as Lunar Module Pilot. They were already training for that mission when the Apollo 1 fire killed the prime crew of Grissom, White, and Chaffee in early 1967.
Rusty Schweickart spent his childhood near Lakehurst Naval Air Station, and by the age of six he could identify most of the warplanes flying overhead by sight – it would be that early fixation that set the direction of his career. Image courtesy of NASA.
That mission was Apollo 9, launched atop a Saturn V from Kennedy Space Center on March the 3rd, 1969. Over ten days in low Earth orbit, the three-man crew put the complete Apollo lunar hardware through its first crewed workout in space.
McDivitt and Schweickart named the Lunar Module “Spider” and the Command and Service Module “Gumdrop” for their odd looks. They separated Spider from Gumdrop, flew it up to roughly 100 miles away, tested the descent and ascent engines, and returned to dock, proving the rendezvous procedure the Moon landing would depend on.
Schweickart logged 241 hours in space on the flight and was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. He never went to space again. He served as backup commander for the first crewed Skylab mission in 1973 and led the ground team that developed the emergency sunshade and jammed-array procedures that saved the station, work that earned him the NASA Exceptional Service Medal.
He moved to NASA Headquarters as Director of User Affairs in 1974, then left the agency in 1977 to serve as California Governor Jerry Brown’s assistant for science and technology. He chaired the California Energy Commission in the early 1980s.
In the mid-1980s he co-founded the Association of Space Explorers, an international professional body for astronauts and cosmonauts. In 2002 he co-founded the B612 Foundation with fellow astronaut Ed Lu and planetary scientists Piet Hut and Clark Chapman, a nonprofit dedicated to detecting and deflecting Earth-bound asteroids.
He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1997, has main-belt asteroid 17033 Rusty named in his honor, and received the Explorers Club’s Legendary Explorer Award in 2024.
Schweickart logged 241 hours in space on Apollo 9 and was awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Image courtesy of NASA.
The Apollo 9 Flown Cassette Tape Shown Here
As noted above, this vintage cassette tape contains “Hodie” (subtitled A Christmas Cantata) by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, we’ve embedded the piece above if you’d like to listen, it’s been described as follows:
“Hodie” (subtitled A Christmas Cantata) is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ final large-scale choral work, completed in 1954 when the composer was 82. It sets a richly varied collection of texts, drawing on Milton, Thomas Hardy, and the King James Bible alongside traditional liturgical sources, for soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists, chorus, boys’ choir, and orchestra.
The work is a joyful, expansive celebration of the Nativity, standing in deliberate contrast to the introspective weight of his symphonies and regarded as one of his most generous and life-affirming statements.
In some respects this cassette is somewhat pre-reminiscent of another space-related cassette that would come along decades later and become far more famous – Star-Lord’s Awesome Mix Vol. 1 from the 2014 film Guardians of the Galaxy. Though Schweickart’s taste in music was far more cerebral.
This tape is now being offered for sale on Heritage Auctions here with a starting bid of $600 USD.
Images courtesy of Heritage Auctions + Rusty Schweickart + NASA
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