Astronaut's Space Oddity cover returns to YouTube

Canadian astronaut Cdr Chris Hadfield's cover of David Bowie's track Space Oddity, recorded on board the International Space Station, is back on YouTube.

The track was recorded as Cdr Hadfield prepared to return to Earth.

It was released on YouTube under a one-year agreement from David Bowie's publisher and had nearly 24 million views.

It was removed in May 2014 at the end of the deal.

Chris Hadfield, who has now retired from the Canadian Space Agency, announced its return in a blog post.

He said there had been "no rancour" in the decision to honour the original agreement and remove the video, and that everybody was keen for it be reinstated.

"The day we took the video down we started to work again to get permission to get it re-posted," he said.

"It wasn't anyone's ill-will or jealousy that kept this version of Oddity off YouTube. It was merely the natural consequence of due process."

He explained some of the legal complexities behind the arrangement.

"The Space Station was built by 15 countries, and depending on where I floated while singing and playing, whose copyright laws applied? Which Space Agency owned the recording? Whose jurisdiction was I in?"

David Bowie himself described Cdr Hadfield's cover as "possibly the most poignant version of the song ever created".

This undoubtedly helped negotiations, Cdr Hadfield suggested.

"As a result... the recent reapplication of the legal process has been fairly straightforward," he added.