It is July 1969. In the US, Nasa is counting down the days until the launch of Apollo 11, the mission intended to land the first humans to set foot on the Moon.

Five days before the planned launch date, Florida’s Kennedy Space Center is a hive of activity; the rest of the world waits with anticipation.

Far away from the launch pads and the looming shape of the Saturn V rocket, London is in the grip of the tail-end of the Swinging Sixties. The Beatles are in a certain St John’s Wood studio, recording the album Abbey Road. The Rolling Stones have, only days before, played to a quarter of a million people at Hyde Park. And a fledgling singer-songwriter –with only one mildly successful album behind him, and almost unknown outside the UK – releases a song that taps in to the space-race fever that has been bubbling away to boiling point.

David Bowie’s Space Oddity took its inspiration from both fact and fiction. The race to the Moon had dominated news headlines since President John F Kennedy unveiled it in 1961. As the Apollo programme stepped up through the gears, Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey, the thought-provoking science fiction epic based on Arthur C Clarke’s novel.