July 20th: When Space Exploration and Music History Collided
About this episode
This episode explores the intersection of space exploration and music history, focusing on the events of July 20th, 1969, and their cultural significance.
On July 20th, 1969, while the whole world had its eyes and ears turned toward the Sea of Tranquility, music history was quietly being made alongside space history. As Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon, the broadcast of that moment reached hundreds of millions of people, and in the days surrounding it, songs about space and the cosmos surged into the cultural conversation. David Bowie's Space Oddity, which had been released just five days earlier on July 11th, suddenly found itself with an almost eerie relevance, its tale of the doomed astronaut Major Tom colliding with the real life triumph of the Apollo 11 mission. The BBC even used the song during its moon landing coverage, seemingly overlooking the fact that the lyrics describe a mission gone tragically wrong, floating in a most peculiar way. That strange bit of programming irony helped cement the song in the public imagination, and it would go on to become one of Bowie's signature pieces, launching him toward the stardom that would define the next decade of his career. But July 20th holds another wonderfully theatrical music history moment too. In 1976, the same day that NASA's Viking…
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