“Imagine you’re a Martian, you’re just about to invade Earth, you’re hiding in the moon… and suddenly you meet the martial music of the bagpipe.”

David Kerr, who lives in Banbury, is a proud Scotsman and a member of the Laidlaw Memorial Pipe Band based in the north Oxfordshire town.

Through mutual friends, Kerr has got to know astronautics entrepreneur Chris Stott – who is the boss of American company Lonestar Data Holdings.

Stott wants to use the technology his firm is developing to store data in space to beam the distinctly Scottish sound of the Laidlaw Memorial Pipe Band onto the Moon.

“He said: ‘It’s time we had a pipe band in space, so what we’re going to do is put you into a thing called a data centre, record some tunes and we’re going to fire you onto the moon.’,” Kerr explained.

Kerr, who is originally from Glasgow, said Stott was at the “leading edge” on installing new data centres in satellites, and even on the lunar surface.

Data centres are the vast warehouses that house stacks of computers that store and process data used by websites, companies and governments.

Firms involved in developing space-based centres argue that putting them on the Moon will offer security from cyber attacks.

Stott is now proposing that they could also become home to the sound of bagpipes.

“I imagine he thought this would be the first part of the Earth’s alien defence system,” Kerr, who is a professor at the University of Oxford, joked.

“The alien’s would turn tail and head back to Mars.”

“President Trump’s half Scottish, so I’m sure he would buy into the whole concept,” Kerr added.

The Laidlaw Memorial Pipe Band is named after David Laidlaw, who remains one of just three pipers to be awarded the Victoria Cross for his heroics in the First World War.

His son John was also a war hero, before teaching bagpiping to the people of Banbury and starting the pipe band.

Now, the sound that the Laidlaw’s inspired could make it into the cosmos.

The satellites are set to launch at the beginning of 2027, with the pipe band’s music to be sent to space later that year.