The film Inside Llewyn Davis (takes place in 1961) features a (fake) song titled "Please Mr. Kennedy (Don't Send Me to Outer Space)" and got me thinking of the many space or Moon songs that were popular during the early Space Age:
Rolling Stones "2000 Light Years From Home" (1967 Apollo 1 mission)
Bowie "Space Oddity" (1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing)
Bowie "Moonage Daydream", "Starman", Elton John "Rocket Man", Harry Nilsson "Spaceman" (1972 Apollo 17 mission)
Not to mention "Fly Me to the Moon" (as recorded by Frank Sinatra) was on the Apollo 11 mission and played on the Moon. The original title was "In Other Words" but was changed.
Is there any evidence the US government financially or otherwise offered incentives for these kinds of songs to help promote the space race the US was in with USSR at the time or is it simply coincidence?
One of the first and most influential space songs was ["Telstar"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar_(song)) - it's one of the progenitors of surf rock, an instrumental recorded by The Tornados in 1962.
The song was written and produced by Joe Meek, and spent five weeks at No. 1 on the charts... in the U.K. It also topped the charts in the U.S., setting the stage for the British Invasion a few years later.
It seems highly unlikely that Meek - brilliant, eccentric, and not American - would have gotten any money from the U.S. government.
People were just fascinated by space stuff. "Telstar" is about a communications satellite of all things, or named after it, anyway.
There was a version with lyrics released a few months later called "Magic Star":
"Telstar
Telstar
Listen to me..."
...
Magic star above
Send a message to my love
Tell her that I'll wait patiently
Sad and so lonely
Dreaming of her only
Swift and graceful as a dove way up above
...
Magic star up high dancing through the sky
Please tell her that "My heart cries for you,"
Please say that one day
I'll hear her voice say
That I'm her one and only boy
And so on.
It didn't do as well as the instrumental.