Houston, we have a rockin' rocket. The legendary rock band Styx has teamed up with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to unveil an awesome space-age music video set to the band's song "Gone Gone Gone."
The video starts with a clip from Vice President Mike Pence's opening address at the first meeting of the reinitiated National Space Council on Oct. 5.
"We will return American astronauts to the moon, not only to leave footprints and flags, but to build a foundation we need to send Americans to Mars and beyond," Pence says in the clip.
The video then launches into the song, which is the first single from Styx's concept album "The Mission," and it's accompanied by a variety of highlights from NASA's development of the SLS rocket and an animation of the megabooster's launch. [Watch: How NASA's Space Launch System Will Fly]
This isn't the first time Styx has blended its space enthusiasm with music. The band created a musical dedication to NASA's Cassini spacecraft at Saturn for the probe's Sept. 15 crash into the ringed planet. In addition, the band's new album "The Mission" was inspired by the possibility of human exploration of Mars. They also visited NASA's New Horizons team in 2015, just ahead of that spacecraft's historic Pluto flyby.
In a Facebook post, Tommy Shaw — the band's guitarist, singer and songwriter — also congratulated NASA for its "success with the Space Launch System," adding, "We're one step closer to Mars."
"Gone Gone Gone" features lyrics like "feel that pressure break through the atmosphere," and "slingshot to outer space; here comes the human race," making it a perfect fit for the launch of the rocket that NASA hopes will one day take humans to the moon and Mars.
NASA's SLS megarocket is designed to launch astronauts on the agency's Orion deep-space capsule on missions beyond low Earth orbit. The first test flight, an uncrewed trip around the moon, is currently scheduled to launch sometime in 2019.
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