Will.i.am is maybe no Sun Ra or Lee Perry in the scope of his Afrofuturist imagination, but he's got everybody else beat for actual interplanetary transmission; and he clearly knows how to leverage the aesthetics of black diasporic science fiction to shift units.

In the first-ever planet-to-planet music broadcast, NASA’s Mars rover, Curiosity, beamed a new song by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas to Earth on Tuesday“Why do they say the sky is the limit when I’ve seen the footprints on the moon?” Will.i.am sings in the song, “Reach for the Stars,” which made its solar system premiere after a 330-million-mile trip, from Earth to Mars and back again.