Songfacts®:

• Deep Purple's Machine Head album opens with "Highway Star," a song about a terrestrial hot rod. It closes with "Space Truckin'," which takes the concept into the galaxy as lead singer Ian Gillan describes a wild ride through the solar system. Both songs are fueled by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's power chords.
• Like many Deep Purple songs of this era, "Space Truckin'" started with a musical idea Ritchie Blackmore brought to the band. The riff he came up with came out of a finger exercise he did based on the Batman theme song.
• The lyrics take us on a wild ride through space, with references to "the Borealice," "Pony Trekker" and "the Canaveral moonstop." Speaking with Songfacts, Deep Purple lyricist Ian Gillan said, "It's not literal - nothing in that song is literal. It's all a play on words."
• The studio version of this song runs a compact 4:31, but when the band played it live, it went much longer, sometimes stretching to about 20 minutes. A performance from a show in Osaka takes up all of Side 4 of the 1972 Deep Purple double-disc live album Made In Japan.
• Like the rest of the Machine Head album, "Space Truckin'" was recorded in a hotel. The plan was to use the Montreux Casino in Switzerland as a studio to help capture their live sound, but the day after they got there, it burned down during a Frank Zappa concert. They had to improvise, so they set up shop in the Grand Hotel, where they were staying. The plan all along was to record it using the mobile unit owned by The Rolling Stones, so they ran cables into the hotel and played in the rooms and corridors. Under these adverse conditions, they worked quickly and didn't get too choosy. The resulting songs were a bit frayed at the edges, but any imperfections were overpowered by the energy they brought to the tracks.
• On this track, Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice gets a solo, which is sandwiched between Ritchie Blackmore guitar solos.
• All five band members - Ian Gillan, Ritchie Blackmore, Roger Glover, Jon Lord, Ian Paice - are credited as writers on this song, as was custom during this era of the band, known as the Mark II lineup. Mark III took over in 1973 with David Coverdale out front. The band split up in 1976, and when they re-formed in 1984, it was with the Mark II lineup, but this time they didn't distribute songwriting credits to everyone.
• "Space Truckin'" got to go into space when the astronaut Kalpana Chawla took a copy of the Machine Head album with her on board the Space Shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated before it could land back on Earth during its 2003 mission. Chawla got to know Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse, which is why she brought the album with her. Morse wrote a song called "Contact Lost," which appeared on the 2003 Deep Purple album Bananas in memory of Chawla and the others on board.
• Ace Frehley released a remake of "Space Truckin'" on his 2020 album of cover songs, Origins Volume 2. He told Rolling Stone that he'd recorded the song years before but hadn't done anything with it up to that point.
  
  Frehley's version sticks close to the original, but what was new about it was the humorously bizarre animated music video, which portrays a campy 1970s-style space opera about a Martian queen who keeps trying to abduct a teddy bear (called a "space bear" in the video) member of Frehley's band. She succeeds, and the video ends with Frehley and his boys preparing to get the bear back.