Everyone's Gone to the Moon Including Bowie...Sort Of

I've been reviewing the manuscript for my latest book, Everyone's Gone to the Moon (release date October 2023), to wrap up the accompanying podcast and realized just how many stories from the book I love. The book focuses on life in the month of July 1969 with an overview of news events - both famous and long forgotten, memories of what life was like during the month by every day people as well as NASA engineers and contractors, and of course, the pop-culture that influences us to this day all intertwined with little known stories about the flight of Apollo 11, our first manned lunar landing. One of my favorite stories is this little gem about David Bowie and his song, "Space Oddity":

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Astronaut Chris Hadley's Version of "Space Oddity"

Only days before the launch of Apollo 11, one of the most iconic rock songs of all time was released. Even if you didn’t like the rock music of the day, you knew the opening line of this song. Even today over almost sixty years later, kids can be heard singing, “Ground control to Major Tom.” It was the classic David Bowie recording, Space Oddity.

You can forgive people for thinking the song was about the first moon landing since it was released only five days before the launch of Apollo 11 on July 11. And in the lyrics, there is one line that sort of gives a nod to the lunar explorers when Major Tom sings, “Here as I’m floating in my tin can, far above the moon.” But that wasn’t the case. The song begins with a surreal 1969 countdown and launch before Major Tom reports all is well and eventually that he is stepping out of the door of his capsule, presumably for a spacewalk. That’s where things take a bit of a dark turn as ground control loses contact with the capsule and frantically try to regain communications.

In a 2003 interview with Performing Songwriter magazine, Bowie set the record straight saying that the song was in fact inspired by the 1968 Stanley Kubrick movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey which was based on the popular novel written by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark.

“I was out of my gourd anyway,” Bowie told the magazine. “I was very stoned when I went to see it [the movie] several times and it was really a revelation to me. It got the song flowing.”
Nevertheless, Phillips Records saw a marketing opportunity and released the song just prior to the Apollo launch. Despite a strong marketing campaign complete with video, the song only peaked at number five on the U.K. charts and barely made a ripple on U.S. charts coming in at #124.

As a side note, when the single was re-released in 1973, Space Oddity reached #15 in America. When it was re-released one more time in 1975 by RCA Records, it became Bowie’s first number one record.

The strong headwind Space Oddity faced in becoming a huge hit early on, at least in the U.K., was due in part to the national radio and television corporation of the British Isles, the B.B.C. At the time, the B.B.C. was virtually in complete control over what the Brits heard and saw on radio and television. When they heard the single, the company immediately banned it from the airwaves until after the flight of Apollo 11 saying that it was in “poor taste” to play it during the mission.

As the saying goes, someone didn’t get the memo about the ban and that someone decided the song would make the perfect theme music for B.B.C. TV’s coverage of Apollo 11.

“It was picked up by British television and used as the background music for the landing itself in Britain,” Bowie later recalled. “Though I’m sure they really weren’t listening to the lyric at all. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to juxtapose against a moon landing. Of course I was overjoyed they did. Obviously some B.B.C. official said, ‘That space song, Major Tom…blah, blah, blah. That’ll be great.’ Nobody had the heart to tell the producer, ‘Um, but he gets stranded in space, sir.’”

Original David Bowie Music Video of "Space Oddity"