"Space Oddity", a tale about a fictional astronaut, was released as a single in July 1969 and became Bowie's first commercial hit, reaching the UK top five.

The contract granted him enough finances to make a new studio album, to be distributed through Mercury in the United States and its affiliate Philips Records in the UK.

[5] Visconti saw "Space Oddity", the chosen lead single, as a "novelty record" and passed the production responsibility for the song to Bowie's former engineer Gus Dudgeon.

He lives with music all day long, it's going on in his room, he writes it, arranges it, produces it, plays it, thinks it, and believes very much in its spiritual source – his whole life is like this.Recording for the new version of "Space Oddity" and its B-side "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" took place on 20 June 1969 at London's Trident Studios; Mercury wanted the single released ahead of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

The lineup consisted of Bowie, Herbie Flowers (bass), Rick Wakeman (Mellotron), Terry Cox (drums), Junior's Eyes' guitarist Mick Wayne and an orchestra arranged by Paul Buckmaster.

[5][11] After the single's release on 11 July, recording for the rest of the album continued five days later, with work commencing on "Janine", "An Occasional Dream" and "Letter to Hermione".

[13] According to the biographer Nicholas Pegg, Bowie's "disillusion" with the "slack attitude" of hippie culture caused him to reshape the lyrics of "Cygnet Committee".

Cann continues that David Bowie marked a turning point for the artist, in that lyrically he began "drawing on life" rather than writing "winsome stories".

Some commentators have also seen the song as a metaphor for heroin use, citing the opening countdown as analogous to the drug's passage down the needle prior to the euphoric "hit", while noting Bowie's admission of a "silly flirtation with smack" in 1968.

[16] A hidden track, subsequently titled "Don't Sit Down", featured at the end of the song on the original UK LP, but was excluded from the US Mercury release and RCA reissue of the album.

[22] Commonly regarded as the track on David Bowie most indicative of the composer's future direction, its lead character is a messianic figure "who breaks down barriers for his younger followers, but finds that he has only provided them with the means to reject and destroy him".

[17] It has been cited as another track that foreshadowed themes to which Bowie would return in the 1970s, in this case the fracturing of personality, featuring the words "But if you took an axe to me, you'd kill another man not me at all".

[10] The Buddhism-influenced "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" is presented in a heavily expanded form compared to the original guitar-and-cello version on the B-side of the "Space Oddity" single; the album cut features a 50-piece orchestra.

Its drawn-out fade/chorus ("The Sun Machine is coming down / And we're gonna have a party") was compared to the Beatles' "Hey Jude";[23] the song has also been interpreted as a derisive comment on the counterculture it ostensibly celebrates.

[17] The outtake "Conversation Piece" has been described as featuring "a lovely melody and an emotive lyric addressing familiar Bowie topics of alienation and social exclusion".

[26][27] The original UK cover artwork featured a facial portrait of Bowie taken by British photographer Vernon Dewhurst, exposed on top of a work by Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely with blue and violet spots on a green background.

[5][17] According to Underwood, the sketches included "a fish in water, two astronauts holding a rose [and] rats in bowler hats representing the Beckenham Arts Lab committee types [Bowie] was so pissed off with".

[17] For the US release in 1970, the album was renamed Man of Words/Man of Music, although Cann writes that this phrase was added to the cover to describe the artist and was not intended to replace the title.

Cann criticises this artwork, stating that it "suffered from sloppy technical application and the image appeared washed out as a result of poor duplication of the transparency".

[5] Cann states that Mercury considered releasing "Janine" as a follow-up single to "Space Oddity", but were uncertain about the song's commercial appeal and scrapped it.

[32] Penny Valentine of Disc & Music Echo was positive, describing the album as "rather doomy and un-nerving, but Bowie's point comes across like a latter-day Dylan.

"[5] Nancy Erlich of The New York Times, in a review published over a year after its release, offered praise, calling it, "a complete, coherent and brilliant vision".

[5] A reviewer for Zygote praised "Space Oddity" and "Memory of a Free Festival", but felt the album as a whole lacks cohesiveness and is "very awkward to the ear".

Dave Thompson of AllMusic wrote: "'Space Oddity' aside, Bowie possessed very little in the way of commercial songs, and the ensuing album emerged as a dense, even rambling, excursion through the folky strains that were the last glimmering of British psychedelia.

"[48] Douglas Wolk of Pitchfork found that Bowie presents numerous ideas throughout the record, but does not know what to do with them, writing, "he wears his influences on his sleeve and constantly overreaches for dramatic effect".

[53] Record Collector's Terry Staunton agreed, saying: "Space Oddity may be regarded as the singer's first 'proper' album, though its mish-mash of styles and strummy experiments suggest he was still trying to settle on an identity.

[54] Pitchfork's Stuart Berman found that the record's "prog-folk hymnals" were a precursor to the "artful glam-rock" sound that made Bowie a star.

[59] Rob Sheffield, in the Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995), considered the album to contain "overripe hippie ballads", with only "Space Oddity" as "a sign of things to come.

While Buckley calls it "the first Bowie album proper",[16] NME editors Roy Carr and Charles Shaar Murray have said, "Some of it belonged in '67 and some of it in '72, but in 1969 it all seemed vastly incongruous.

[5] He highlights "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed", "Wild Eyed Boy from Freecloud" and "Cygnet Committee" as showcasing Bowie's evolution as a lyricist, but ultimately believes the "monolithic reputation" of "Space Oddity" does the album more harm than good.