Mission ControlMission Control

Mission Control launched on SomaFM in 2009, the same year as PopTron, nine years into a station Rusty Hodge started from his basement garage in Bernal Heights after running a micropower transmitter at Burning Man in 1999. SomaFM has been commercial-free and listener-supported since it went full-time in February 2000, and that arrangement is what makes room on a network of twenty-odd channels for one built on a premise this narrow, and keeps it on air long after the novelty wore off.

The channel splices ambient and experimental electronica with archival audio from the space program — countdowns, capsule communications, flight director chatter — so NASA transmissions surface in the gaps between records. It celebrates space exploration without ever narrating it, landing closer to a control room at four in the morning than to a documentary.