Songs About Failed Spacecraft and Space Disasters
This week, I’m handing over Fear of Landing to my friend Jack Keller who promised me a playlist of music relating to my interests.
All of the titles except one link to YouTube. I’ve also created the playlist on Spotify for those I could find, which is embedded at the bottom.
It’s quite a change of pace so I hope you enjoy it as a late summer bit of fun.
Tragedy in Orbit: A Soundtrack
by Jack Keller
Sylvia’s musical knowledge unfortunately peaks somewhere around nostalgic pop and Taylor Swift. While she can tell you exactly why Challenger’s O-rings failed, she somehow missed decades of musicians turning space tragedies into music.
Space disasters are the tragic punctuation marks in humanity’s love letter to the cosmos. We love to dream about the stars, but we remember the disasters longer than the triumphs. Musicians across genres have turned these failures into haunting, beautiful, and sometimes weirdly upbeat tracks.
This is a playlist for every moment humanity reached for the stars… and missed.
The Canonical Catastrophes (You Knew These Were Coming)
Let’s get the expected hits out of the way.
David Bowie – “Space Oddity”
Major Tom drifts off into space in the most stylish way possible. This is the original blueprint for sad astronaut music.
Peter Schilling – “Major Tom (Coming Home)”
The synthy German continuation nobody needed, but everyone secretly enjoys. Ambiguity meets drum machine.
Elton John – “Rocket Man”
Emotional collapse in a velvety falsetto. Less disaster, more despair.
Crash and Echo: Post-Rock and Space Disaster
This is where it gets weird and wonderful. Post-rock artists, in particular, have developed a whole micro-genre around space tragedies: instrumental laments with titles that feel like obituaries written by HAL-9000.
We Lost the Sea – “Challenger Part 1: Flight” & “Challenger Part 2: A Swan Song”
An instrumental memorial to the Challenger disaster, using real NASA audio from the launch. The songs build and break like the mission they honor.
Frank Turner – “Silent Key”
Told from the perspective of Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died on the Challenger. It imagines her voice still broadcasting from orbit.
Tommy N. Tucker – “Spirit of the Challenger”
A 1986 tribute so sincere it hurts. Recorded and released shortly after the disaster and I’m still looking for an online version.
Sex Clark Five – “51-L”
Named after Challenger’s mission designation (STS-51-L). A strange punk mini-anthem for space trauma.
Scott Manley, performed by his daughter Skye – “You Will Not Go To Space Today”
A satirical but affectionate musical love letter to failed launches, technical mishaps, and all the burning wreckage between.
The Long Winters – “The Commander Thinks Aloud”
Inspired by the Columbia disaster. Lyrics explore the last moments of a shuttle breaking apart on re-entry. Brutal, poetic, and gentle.
Mastodon – “Oblivion”
Metal meets melancholy. Allegedly influenced by the Columbia tragedy. Includes the line, “Falling from grace ’cause I’ve been away too long.”
Failure – “Another Space Song”
Less about a specific incident, more about the vibe of dying alone in the vacuum. Shoegaze for your oxygen-deprived soul.
Lost in Orbit: Ambient Space Sadness Bonus Tracks
No specific disaster, just that general, soul-wilting realization that space is a cold, uncaring void.
God Is an Astronaut – “Suicide by Star”
Possibly the most “on brand” post-rock band name of all time. This track is like watching a beautiful slow-motion tragedy unfold in reverse.
Explosions in the Sky – “Your Hand in Mine”
It’s been used in space documentaries and trailers even though it has nothing to do with space, because it feels like space.
Hammock – “Turn Away and Return”
If stardust could cry, this would be the sound. Endless ambient grief.
MONO – “Ashes in the Snow”
The musical version of floating silently through a debris field of your own ambition.
Conclusion: Space is Tragedy’s Favorite Stage
There’s something hauntingly poetic about the way music captures space disaster. Maybe it’s the silence of space and how sound can fill that silence with mourning, meaning, or reverb-heavy crescendo.
So whether you’re building a playlist for a space-themed funeral or just want to feel small in the face of a cruel, expanding universe, these songs will do the job.
The rockets don’t always make it, but someone always writes the soundtrack.
Thank you Jack!
However, in defense of my street cred, I would like to point out that I remember Peter Schilling’s song in the original German.
I hope you enjoyed Jack’s collection! I’m going to admit to having the two tracks by We Lost the Sea on repeat ever since I saw the draft of the article.
Here’s the Spotify playlist:
If you know of other songs that clearly need to be included, let me know in the comments!
“Komarov’s Fall” by Brett Dean (2006) deserves to be on any list, even if it’s a different genre of music and not technically a “song”. https://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Brett-Dean-Komarov-s-Fall/47876
Ground Control to Major Tom
Filk, the genre of music adjacent to science fiction fandom, has lots of songs about space disasters, real and imagined. Unfortunately most of them are only accessible if you stop by the filk room at your local science fiction convention and ask people to sing you some.
That was true a while ago; these days, some filkers have their own websites, and the ones that don’t can be heard through filk publishers, or even broadband publishers like bandcamp.com.
Leslie Fish, the doyenne of filk singers, put out two LPs in the days before CDs; the second, Solar Sailors, includes “Banned from Argo”, a description of the … undisciplined … shore leave of the crew of the starship Enterprise. (“Our proper cool first officer … taught the bridge computer how to swear.”) (Full lyrics at https://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/banned-from-argo.html, original recording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wesjEq6OqQs; I see it has become sufficiently notorious to have its own Wikipedia entry.)
Fish also wrote what I had thought was the only true song about a space disaster, but I see Sylvia has found other songs about the Challenger explosion; I’d add a link for Fish’s contribution, but all I’m finding is an unrelated song.
“Roswell” by Reina del Cid, a female folk duo.
My link skips over the backstory, if you want that, please rewind.
(Not a real spacecraft mishap, but then Major Tom isn’t real either.)
“Dark Star” was John Carpenter’s first movie he made as a film student at USC on a shoestring budget of $60,000. I have always liked the title song for this movie. The lyrics were written by Bill Tayler and music by John Carpenter and sung by John Yager. “Benson, Arizona” is a clever country western song about a lonely space traveler being torn apart from his lover by relativity. The song features at the end of the film, which fits the brief. Half a century old, the main theme of the film is eerily current.
How do you not include “Ashes to Ashes,” Bowie’s sequel to “Space Oddity” ?