It begins with a voice from the ground, calm and procedural, counting down to something no one has ever done before. Then an acoustic guitar, a strange buzzing toy instrument, and a young man’s voice, light and almost conversational, telling us about an astronaut named Major Tom. When David Bowie released “Space Oddity” on July 11, 1969, five days before Apollo 11 left for the Moon, it sounded like a novelty record timed to a news event — and in a sense it was. But underneath the countdown and the space-age sound effects was something stranger and more durable: a song about a man who leaves Earth, loses contact with everyone who loves him, and drifts away, content, into the dark. It became Bowie’s first hit, his first British number one (six years later), and the opening chapter of a character he would revisit for the rest of his life. The story of “Space Oddity” is the story of how a 22-year-old with no record deal, no hit and a reputation as a folk oddity wrote a song about being lost in space — and found himself instead.
To understand why the record mattered, you have to understand where David Bowie stood in 1969. He was not a newcomer, exactly, and he was not a star. He was a young London singer-songwriter who had already tried and failed to break through, and who was running out of chances. Born David Robert Jones in Brixton in January 1947, he had released a debut album on Deram in 1967 that sold almost nothing, and Deram had dropped him. He had played in bands, studied mime, and drifted through the London underground scene, collecting ideas and personas the way other young men collected records. By late 1968 his manager, Kenneth Pitt, was putting together a promotional film, Love You Till Tuesday, to show television and film producers what his client could do. Bowie needed a centrepiece — a song that would make people stop and look. He went back to his room in Clareville Grove, London, picked up a 12-string Hagstrom guitar, and wrote one.
The song’s creation story is, fittingly, a story about looking up. In May 1968 Bowie had seen Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it had lodged in his imagination: the vastness, the silence, the strange beauty of a man alone in a machine far from home. On Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders had photographed Earth rising over the Moon — the Earthrise image — and that picture was still hanging in the public mind when Bowie sat down to write. He had also, by his own later account, been feeling a deep sense of alienation in his own career: a young artist watching the world change around him, unsure whether anyone was listening. Out of those ingredients came Major Tom, a fictional astronaut launched into space in a manner much like the Apollo missions, who receives a message from Ground Control that something has gone wrong — and who, instead of panicking, simply lets go, floating in his tin can, far above the Moon, as the signal fades. The title itself was a play on Kubrick’s film, and the song’s most famous image — a planet that is blue, and a man who has nothing left to do — was Bowie’s way of saying that leaving everything behind can feel less like disaster than release.
The recording captures that feeling in sound, and the way it was made tells you something about the London music world of 1969. An early version of the song had been cut on February 2, 1969, at Morgan Studios in Willesden for the Love You Till Tuesday film, with Bowie and his musical partner John Hutchinson sharing the vocals and Bowie adding an ocarina and a Stylophone, the pocket electronic organ that would become one of the record’s signatures. But the hit version came later, after Mercury Records heard a demo and offered Bowie a deal, with the single to be rushed out ahead of the Apollo 11 landing. The session took place on June 20, 1969, at Trident Studios in London, and it was produced not by Bowie’s regular collaborator Tony Visconti but by Gus Dudgeon, a young engineer-turned-producer who would later make his name with Elton John. Visconti had heard the song and dismissed it as a novelty record, a gimmick to cash in on the moonshot, and he declined to produce it, passing the job to Dudgeon with his blessing. Dudgeon, hearing the demo, called it unbelievable, and he and Bowie planned every detail of the recording together.
The session itself was, by the standards of the time, a small orchestral event. Bowie sang lead and harmony vocals and played 12-string acoustic guitar and Stylophone — the instrument, a gift from Marc Bolan, whose buzzing tone Bowie used in the opening, as if a toy were trying to sound like a spaceship. Around him were guitarist Mick Wayne of Junior’s Eyes, bassist Herbie Flowers, Mellotron player Rick Wakeman (who recorded his part in two takes after hearing the demo once, on an instrument he had never seen before that day), and an orchestra arranged by Paul Buckmaster: eight violins, two violas, two cellos, two arco basses, two flutes and an organ. Dudgeon’s budget for the session, carefully estimated, came to £493 and 17 shillings — session fees, instrument hire, twelve hours of recording and mixing, and one reel of tape. The same session also produced the single’s B-side, “Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud,” cut quickly with the time left over. Within three weeks the single was pressed and released, on July 11, 1969, on Philips in Britain and Mercury in America — five days before Apollo 11 launched, and nine days before men walked on the Moon.
The single’s chart story was slow, strange, and — in the end — triumphant, and it is worth telling in full because it shows how a song can take years to find its audience. At first it sold poorly. The BBC, nervous about playing a song about a space mission that might end in disaster, held off broadcasting it until the Apollo 11 crew had safely returned; only after the landing did the record get its airplay, when the BBC used it during its moon-landing coverage. It debuted at number 48 on the UK Singles Chart in September 1969 and climbed, week by week, to number 5, becoming Bowie’s first hit — and, remarkably, his only chart hit for another three years. In America it barely registered at all, stalling at number 124 on the Billboard Hot 100, and in Ireland it reached number 13. It also won Bowie the 1970 Ivor Novello Special Award for Originality, the first major recognition of his songwriting. But the song’s real chart life was still ahead of it. After Ziggy Stardust made Bowie a star, RCA reissued the song in America in 1972 (backed with “The Man Who Sold the World”), and this time it reached number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 — Bowie’s first American hit — and number 16 in Canada. Then, in 1975, RCA reissued it again in Britain, as part of a maxi-single with “Changes” and “Velvet Goldmine,” and it went all the way to number 1 in November 1975, Bowie’s first British chart-topper, six years after it was recorded. A song written to cash in on a moon landing had outlasted the moon landing itself.
Its afterlife has been longer than its chart run, and it has run in exactly the direction its title promised. Bowie himself kept Major Tom alive: in 1980 he released “Ashes to Ashes,” a sequel in which Ground Control re-establishes contact with a Tom who has become a junkie, a drifting figure of the new decade, and he would invoke the character again in “Hallo Spaceboy” in the 1990s. The song has been covered by dozens of artists and used in films and television, from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013) onward, always as shorthand for the moment a person steps away from ordinary life and looks back at Earth. But its most extraordinary afterlife came from space itself. In May 2013, the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, commander of Expedition 35 aboard the International Space Station, recorded a version of “Space Oddity” while floating inside the station, singing and playing guitar as the Earth turned beneath him. It was the first music video ever filmed in space. Hadfield changed the ending — in his version, Major Tom receives his orders to land and comes home safely, a deliberate, optimistic rewrite for a man about to return from his final mission — and Bowie, who had granted permission for the recording, called it “possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created.” The video was briefly taken offline when its one-year licence expired, then restored after negotiations. Fifty years after the original, in 2019, Tony Visconti — the producer who had once refused the song — remixed Bowie’s original recording for its anniversary, with a new video directed by Tim Pope that premiered at a NASA event at the Kennedy Center. The man who had called it a novelty had come back to honour it.
There is a final pleasure in the story, and it belongs to the toy instrument. The Stylophone, bought for a few shillings from a small shop near Trident Studios, was a child’s gadget, a pocket organ played with a stylus, and it sounds, on “Space Oddity,” like nothing else in pop: thin, buzzing, slightly out of this world, exactly right for a song about a man in a tin can. Bowie had been given his by Marc Bolan, and the instrument’s makers promptly used Bowie in their advertising. It is a fitting symbol for the whole record. “Space Oddity” was made by a young man with no deal, a borrowed idea from a film, a toy instrument, a producer who had almost never produced, and a session band assembled for less than £500 — and it became one of the most enduring songs of the century. The grandest subject in the world, the Moon, and the smallest means: a guitar, a toy, and a voice.
That is why “Space Oddity” still works, more than fifty-five years later, for listeners who have never bought a Bowie album and never will. It is not Bowie’s biggest hit in America, and it is not his strangest song. It is the one that tells the truth about what he always was: a young man who felt alienated on Earth and imagined, with complete seriousness, what it would be like to leave it — and who discovered, in imagining it, that millions of other people felt the same way. The charts gave it number 5, then number 15, then number 1, in that order, over six years. The Moon gave it its moment. And Major Tom, floating in his tin can, gave it the rest: a character who never came home, and who therefore never had to stop being a mystery. Planet Earth is blue. There is nothing left to do. And somehow, that has never stopped sounding like a beginning.
Watch the video below and listen for the moment the countdown ends and the Stylophone first buzzes in behind the guitar. It is the sound of a 22-year-old with nothing to lose, aiming at the Moon — and of a song that, against every odd in the book, actually got there.