Like Elon Musk and Carl Sagan before him, Jack White wants to inspire the public by journeying into space. Not himself, that is. He sent a round, plastic surrogate in his place (a vinyl record, he sent a vinyl record).

Over the weekend, whilst the rest of us were playing Pokemon Go and dreading the coming Monday, a crack team commissioned by White himself were launching an experiment to play a vinyl record in space for the first time ever.

“Our main goal from inception to completion of this project was to inject imagination and inspiration into the daily discourse of music and vinyl lovers,” White said in a statement, via Rolling Stone.

“Combining our creative impulses with those of discovery and science is our passion, and even on the scale that we are working with here, it was exhilarating to decide to do something that hasn’t been done before and to work towards its completion.”

White tapped engineer and friend Kevin Carrico to build what became the “space-proof” Icarus Craft, an interstellar turntable attached to a high-altitude balloon designed to keep a specially built record spinning in space.

The record Third Man chose to place on the Icarus Craft was, fittingly enough, Carl Sagan’s ‘A Glorious Dawn’, which as Rolling Stone noted, Third Man previously reissued as a 7″ single back in 2009.

According to Third Man, the Icarus Craft reached a peak altitude of 94,413 feet after 81 minutes of flight time before the balloon burst. As far as we can tell, this means the Icarus Craft left the Earth’s troposphere and began inching towards the stratosphere.

So how did the record actually sound? Pretty terrible, actually. Granted, the record and player had to combat high-altitude winds and other elements inherent in travelling into space, but we expected more from an audiophile like Jack White.

Check out the footage below.

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