Start the countdown and cue the music.

Some of the earliest space tributes bordered more on fantasy than reality.

For example, a 1957 song called "Sputnik (Satellite Girl)" by Jerry Engler and the Four Ekkos assured listeners that:

It came out almost immediately after the Soviet Union put Sputnik into orbit on October 4, 1957, to kick off the space race.

The Soviets began churning out their own musical tributes after the 1961 flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. Songs with stirring titles like "The Constellation of Gagarin" and "Motherland Knows Her Son Is Flying In Orbit" soon appeared on the Soviet musical landscape.

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It didn't take long for American songwriters to catch up.

In 1962, "The Ballad of John Glenn" by Roy West and "The Epic Ride of John H. Glenn" by Walter Brennan and the Johnny Mann Singers paid homage to the Mercury astronaut's historic journey aboard Friendship 7.

Glenn's flight on February 20, 1962, was America's first piloted orbital mission. It galvanized the nation and gave Americans hope of catching up with the Soviets in space.

Houston blues-man Sam "Lightnin' " Hopkins recorded "Happy Blues for John Glenn" that same day after watching the flight on his landlady's television.

As the song goes:

The first moonwalk by Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on July 20, 1969, inspired another round of tributes.

From The Byrds, the band that pioneered space rock, came the prayer-like, "Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins."

From Duke Ellington came "Moon Maiden," which he recorded as his vocal debut.

And from John Stewart, best known as a member of the Kingston Trio before he went solo, came the controversial "Armstrong," a tribute to the first man to step onto the moon.

"The message of the song was that even though there are ghettos in Chicago and people are starving in India and we've completely ravaged the planet, we could for one moment sit there and watch one of our kind walk on the moon," Stewart recalled. "Where we have really failed we have also succeeded greatly."

But when Capitol Records released the single that summer, the song was immediately criticized.

"Everyone took it as a putdown of the moonshot, which was not intended at all," Stewart said later. "It was banned on radio stations and some stations were even breaking the record on the air. It got on the charts at Number 80 and the next week it got to Number 50, and then it disappeared."

In the space-shuttle era came tributes from Roy McCall and Southern Gold ("Blast Off Columbia") and the Canadian rock group Rush ("Countdown").

Songwriter Casse Culver paid homage in 1983 to Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, with the stirring, "Ride, Sally, Ride."

It did not hurt that the chorus was reminiscent of Wilson Pickett's soul classic, "Mustang Sally." (Ride is president of SPACE.com.)

The Challenger accident on January 28, 1986, touched off several tributes to the seven astronauts who were killed. One was "Flying For Me" by John Denver, who had lobbied NASA to fly him on a shuttle.

The song was never released as a single but Denver performed it at a Senate hearing and it appeared on the 1987 multi-artist album "Challenger: The Mission Continues." Denver died in 1997 when his experimental aircraft crashed in Monterey Bay, California.

Astronaut-musician Ron McNair, one of the crew members on Challenger, had planned to play and record in orbit an instrumental sax composition by Jean Michel Jarre called "Last Rendezvous."

But McNair never got the chance.

Instead, Jarre arranged for the piece to be played three months later at the concert "Rendezvous at Houston." Sitting in for Ron McNair on the sax solo for "Last Rendezvous" was Kirk Whalum. The concert on April 5, 1986, drew more than 1 million people, earning it a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.

"Last Rendezvous (Ron's Piece)" was included in the album "Rendezvous," issued a few weeks later as a dedication to the fallen astronaut and his crew.

Jarre, according to sci-fi master Arthur C. Clarke, "made the most impressive single contribution to space music."

Tributes are still being written decades after the so-called "golden age" of the space program. The late 1990s inspired musical tributes to Glenn's return to orbit aboard the space shuttle and to the flight of Eileen Collins, NASA's first female shuttle commander.

One of the latest space tributes may take a ride to Mars

The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, scheduled to be launched in 2003, will carry the recording "Beagle 2" performed by the British pop band Blur. The band helped raise funds for the Beagle 2 lander mission.

If all goes well, the song will be played back to Earth on Christmas Day 2003, a day before the Beagle 2 is expected to land on the Martian surface.