Although they famously never repeated a setlist, one thing the Grateful Dead did play every night was an improvisational journey fittingly referred to as "space." It wasn't all that surprising then that when bassist Phil Lesh performed at an actual NASA research facility in Northern California this past weekend, he would assemble a group of jam-savvy musicians and, well, pretty much play an entire set of "space."

The performance was a part of Yuri's Night Bay Area, one of more than 100 Yuri's Nights that took place around the world, celebrating the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first manned excursion into space in 1961. While Amon Tobin played a set of futuristic drill-n-bass in an adjacent hanger, Phil Lesh's specially-assembled outfit, called Telstar, demonstrated just how far electronic music has come, as they waddled through a set of jams that would've sounded futuristic in, say, 1992. Keyboardist Steve Molitz (Particle) told the crowd that the idea behind an all-improvisational set was "that we can all explore outer and inner space at the same time, without really knowing where we're going."

With NASA aircraft as a backdrop, the exploratory performance was indeed often more spacey than cosmic but, man, was the light show ever out of this world.