PageSix.com, NY
February 23, 2008
He’s known for his soaring vocals, but when it comes to flying high, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler confesses that he’s crashed and burned more than once. But would you believe he’s talking about his experiences piloting NASA’s space shuttle?
The demon of screamin’, pictured above in astronaut gear with his bandmates, first developed a taste for space while penning tracks for 1998’s Armageddon. He tells the February/March issue of Private Air magazine that he has since become a regular at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Of the former, he recalls with a laugh: “One time I was using the simulator, and I had a chance to take off and land the shuttle. It’s really difficult, you know. You can’t look out the window and tell if you’re upside down, because you’re in space.
“So you have to know by feeling. I was wrong, and I pulled up. It got too hot, the shuttle caught on fire and we crashed.”
As for the Kennedy Space Center, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, 59, says he drops in whenever he can for Earth-to-space confabs with astronauts currently aloft: “They let me go into the command room, and I use whatever code names I have to — I’m not at liberty to say what those are — and then say to them, ‘Ah, guys, this is Steven Tyler. I hope you are rockin’ out for us up there like we are down here for you.’ Then the guy goes, ‘Wait a minute…’”
The musician’s affinity for the cosmos is so strong that, a few years back, he got the money together for a trip aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. “They were going to teach me Russian and I was going up. The only reason I passed on it was because of my kids,” he says.
“I was sitting in a restaurant, and they started crying. ‘Daddy, no, no.’ But, I was ready. I was so ready.”
More photos: (here).