Even though this song ascended the charts just as David Bowie was making rapid headway into world popular culture as a figure of ambiguous sexuality cum decadence, none of that really has very much to do with it. In the first place, the timeframe is wrong. The song actually supplies the title and appeared on Bowie's second album, from four years earlier, his wannabe hippie by way of Marc Bolan's Tyrannosaurus Rex outing of 1969, Space Oddity. In the second place, as with Elton John's "Rocket Man" from 1972, it's an oblique and by all signs quite sincere tribute to the U.S. Apollo program to reach and explore the moon, then in progress. Sure, it tries to strike the knowing tone with the pun on the Kubrick film title and Bowie's everlasting conceit as the outsider peering in—the alien, the man who fell to earth—one of the few continuing themes across much of his career. But there's nothing about the straight life that gets sent up or mocked here, try as you may to find it (and people did). Instead, and refreshingly I think, the terms of space exploration itself actually seem to have caught Bowie's imagination, as he tries to grasp and relate what he thinks the experience of being an astronaut must be like, "sitting in a tin can far above the world." In fact, in the story he tries to make of it he's actually guilty of a shameless ham-handedness as said astronaut encounters calamity and doom. "Tell my wife I love her very much"—yeah, and why don't you pat Elvis Presley's dog Shep on the head while you're at it. Nevertheless, it's ultimately a stark and lovely meditation on the space age we were and still are entering and its best qualities live on undiminished.
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