Top Five Songs inspired by the Space Race

It's fifty years since the Space Race ended. America had won, and that was all that counted. Nobody was interested in what happened next. As if to prove the point, the original series of Star Trek was canned a full month before Apollo 11 touched down.

The Space Race was only ever really a proxy for the Cold War. Rockets that could carry people into space could also, obviously, carry atomic bombs back down to earth. The main reason the Russians held their early lead in the race was because their nuclear warheads were bigger and heavier and so their rockets needed to be more powerful.

However, whilst the technical legacy of space race is mixed - and before anyone says it Teflon was patented in 1945 and was not developed by NASA - it's musical legacy is much richer. Picking just five songs to represent it was difficult, but here I go.

Click on the heading to listen to the song.

5. Telestar by The Tornados 

Dylan aside, not many songs from the early sixties, the era of the Clean Cut Crooner, have stood the test of time, and it's arguable really if this one has. However, people remember it fondly and it turns up on various compilation albums.

The song is now more famous than the satellite, which is a bit of a pity as the original Telstar 1, launched in July 1962, was the world's first communication satellite. It wasn't in geostationary orbit, so it didn't exactly fulfil the roll that Arthur C Clarke had predicted back in 1945, but it was able to provide the first live trans-Atlantic link.

Communication satellites have changed the world far more than walking on the moon ever did, so it's only fair to remember the original.

4. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss

This piece of music was not written for the space race.It was in fact written in 1896 by Strauss, a composer with unfortunate Nazi connections, inspired by a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher with unfortunate Nazi connections. However, the only part of the hour long piece that most people know is the opening section called Sunrise, and that's because of it's use in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Until pictures of the real thing came back a year later, this film was what people thought exploring the moon looked like. In fact, there's a strong argument for saying that Kubrick's film is better than the real thing; it's both more poetic, but also a lot more troubling. Utterly incomprehensible to most people who first see it, a re-watching shows 2001 to be a fascinating and complex critique of the culture that put man-on-the-moon. From the scene above which links the ape creatures to the near future (as 2001 was in 1968), when the leader's bone weapon thrown in the air turns into an orbiting nuclear missile, to the complete lack of emotion in the space station scenes, to the murderous-but-honest computer HAL, to the acid-trip ending; Stanley Kubrick took Arthur C Clarke's hard sci-fi tale of First Contact and subtlety turned it on its head.

Real astronauts watched the film too, and the crew of Apollo 13, who named their command module Odyssey, were listening to this piece of music just before the explosion that suddenly made the space race interesting again.

3. Whitey On The Moon by Gil Scott-Heron

Armstrong and Aldrin's successful trip to the moon and back inspired a number of pop songs, most fairly trivial offerings. Scott-Heron's spoken word piece though is not. A jazz poet from Chicago, he was very much aware that billions of dollars had been spent on putting two white guys on the moon, whilst millions of his fellow people of colour still lived in poverty.

One particular beef of his, as you can tell from the lyrics, was the lack of affordable healthcare. Still a live issue today, but in 1969, when most working class men would be in the type of job that still came with health insurance, one that was even more racially divisive than today.

Other songs on a similar vein were to be made in the years to come, with Hawkwind's Uncle Sam's On Mars, which compares the destruction of the environment here on earth with the delusions of space exploration, being one of my favourites. This song was the original though, and Hawkwind's knowing riff on the same theme. For it's power and relevance Scott-Heron is the perfect response to Apollo 11.

2. Go! by Public Service Broadcasting

The Apollo moon landings, of course, came with their own soundtrack, and musicians have been sampling the recordings of the astronauts speaking to mission control ever since they were made, but nobody has made such good use of them as Public Sector Broadcasting.

Part of their album The Race For Space, which is made up entirely of sample audio set to music, Go! tells the story of Apollo 11 from the point of view of the folks at Mission Control. As the tension builds we are intruded to the people who will ultimately decide is the eagle lands or not, the Mission Controllers. Under the super-cool direction of Flight Director Gene Kranz, we are introduced to the laconic FIDO (which stands for Flight Dynamics Officer), the excitable Guidance and the rest of the chorus.

The original recordings are out there to be listened to if you want to, although it's not terribly exciting. "The eagle has landed", for example, was said for the press and the actual moment of reaching the moon was marked by Aldrin simply saying "Contact light". Even the very real drama of that did occur during the landing is underplayed.

In the song you can Armstrong call "1202 alarm" as the Eagle descends. This indicated that the spaceships navigation computer, which probably had less processing power than your washing machine, was overloaded with data and was rebooting itself. Kranz turned to 25 year old NASA engineer Jack Garman to make the decision. Abort the mission and America may not achieve Kennedy's dream of landing on the moon before the decade was out. Fail to abort and Armstrong and Aldrin's trip could be one way. In the end Garman called "Go", trusting his programming to keep the computer prioritising the landing. It was the right call.

The young people at Mission Control may not have taken the same risks as the astronauts, but it was their cool that got the fly-boys to the moon.

1. Space Oddity by David Bowie

Well, obviously Bowie was going to be Number One.

Coming out nine days before that 'giant leap for mankind', Bowie has been the soundtrack for the moon landings for almost fifty years. I say 'almost' because the track only reached number 5 in the UK charts in 1969, and most people didn't hear of Bowie again until he reappeared as Ziggy Stardust three years later. Space Oddity was re-released in 1975 and finally became the number one it should have been in '69.

There's nothing I can say about this song that's not already been said. What's interesting to me though, firstly, is how the lyrics owe more to Dan Dare than Neil Armstrong. We have 'countdown' rather than 'launch sequence', 'ground control' rather than 'mission control', 'capsule' rather than 'command module' and so on.

It's also a very maudlin song, a eulogy to the Space Race. The space fantasies of the comic book of the fifties had finally come to pass, and they were frankly a bit disappointing. All this comes across in the character of Major Tom. A remarkably English type of astronaut, he seems to take a jaundiced view of the fame that comes with space travel. And this, don't forget, was a song that came out a week before Apollo 11 took off. Genius.