The space-faring life can’t be an easy one. Bobbing around in zero-gravity, dodging meteorites and having to ask the others to look away when you need a piss.

It must be a stressful old experience orbiting the Earth.

Which is why NASA’s latest manoeuvre seems like an especially sadistic move. Oh, yes – they’ve only gone and subjected the Discovery Space Shuttle to an early morning blast of U2.

The technological equivalent of a small child holding a magnifying glass to the sun and setting the ants on fire, technicians decided that was the on-board astronauts really needed to wake them up in the morning was U2′s Vertigo.

Vertigo – a song so mediocre it could work in Halfords – isn’t really the sort of thing purpose-designed as alarm-clock fodder. When hecklerspray awoke to it one morning, the following seething rage resulting in foul-mouthed yelling and near-arrest. And that was just in Neasden. God knows how it’d feel when you’re a couple of thousand miles above the surface of the planet.

So what next, NASA? What other torture have you lined up for those bold interstellar explorers? James Blunt, maybe? Maroon 5?

Just don’t be surprised if everything goes a little bit Event Horizon…

[story by C J Davies]