The music video for “Blackstar” opens with a dead astronaut on some distant planet. An alien carefully walks up and opens the helmet, revealing a jewel encrusted skull. She takes the skull back to her village where it becomes a sort of religious relic. Later in the video, a headless skeleton drifts into the cosmic abyss.
This is widely suspected to be the final chapter in the story of Major Tom. In an interview with Vice, director Johan Renck was asked directly if this was the case. He gave a very open-ended answer, saying that there was not a “deliberate, underlying, firm quest to have any references to past times”, but also that it was “in the eye of the beholder”. Characters like the astronaut and Button Eyes started from Bowie’s sketches that he and Renck picked through for ideas. Bowie may not have referred to his astronaut sketch as Major Tom outright, and thus Renck did not want to force that name onto the astronaut if Bowie meant for it to be nameless or just implied. It seemed it would be up to you to decide.
However, in the film David Bowie: The Last Five Years, Renck says that the astronaut was “100% Major Tom.”