Songfacts®:

• In the '80s, Russia launched a few monkeys into orbit as part of their space program. It always made news when they launched, but then we never heard about them. In this song, John Prine conjures up a story about one of these space monkeys, imagining how he was taken from a tree at a young age, dressed in a spacesuit, and launched with a bunch of bananas. He then checks in to see how the monkey is doing now that his celebrity days are over. Turns out he's in a karaoke bar, having some drinks with friends.
• Prine wrote this song with Peter Case, a renowned singer-songwriter who was in the bands The Nerves and The Plimsouls before starting a solo career. In a Songfacts interview with Case, he told the story.
  
  Case and Prine met at a festival in Canada. When Case came through Nashville to perform, Prine went to the show and after, they wrote some songs together. One of them was "Wonderful 99," which Case recorded for his 1992 album Six-Pack Of Love. Another was "Space Monkey," which went to Prine.
  
  "We were over at his house and he was cooking," Case said. "We were fooling around for a while, and he had this song he wanted to write. He had a song he played every time he opened up the guitar case. He had music, but he never had any words for it. He couldn't figure out what to write about. Then he goes, 'Let's write a song about the first monkey that went into outer space. What he's been doing since his 15 minutes of fame.' And from there, the song just wrote itself. It was like two in the morning."
  
  A song like this doesn't rely on veracity, so it's OK that the first space monkey's weren't Russian. The were American, with the first one launched in 1948.
• John Prine didn't release a studio version of this song but included it on his 1997 album Live On Tour, recorded when he was touring for his 1995 album Lost Dogs + Mixed Blessings.