There was something special about the early days of human spaceflight.
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins traveled to the Moon in the most powerful rocket ever, and had fun doing so. Armstrong and Aldrin laughed as they experienced gravity-assisted jumps on the Moon. Michael Collins made everyone laugh back in NASA Mission Control when he said during day three of the mission that Aldrin had already eaten 19 bowls of oatmeal. During Apollo 14’s stint on the Moon, Alan Shepard played golf. There was a certain joviality in the early days, when astronauts went further than any human ever had, and enjoyed it, and also knew they were part of pushing the frontier forward.
Modern spaceflight doesn’t feel this way, and hasn’t for a long time.
It seems like a certain type of narrative won the culture war. The narrative that space exploration is too expensive, and that “we should focus on problems here on Earth instead of going to space.” Nevermind that so many critical technologies arose out of the shadow of the space age. Nevermind that NASA’s 2024 budget is 0.2% of the 2024 total federal budget.
Some space companies still have the magic. When I was in high school, I remember a group of my friends gathering around a computer monitor and watching as SpaceX launched a rocket; the excitement in the room was palpable. Somehow, despite the ennui of the larger space industry, I still get the same feeling from watching SpaceX. I felt it in 2021, when I watched the Inspiration4 mission launch from across the bay near Cape Canaveral, and I feel it still as SpaceX test-launches their Starship prototypes, with an absence of gravitas, the type of attitude needed if we want to see space progress in our lifetimes.
I think space exploration is still cool, but lately it feels like it is missing an element of wonder. Every time I’m in Washington, D.C., I go to the National Air and Space Museum. Visiting museums that spotlight the early days of space exploration is a weird experience; it's like imagining an alternate history where human spaceflight never stagnated, and the dreams of space exploration stayed in the human consciousness.
Science fiction aesthetics tend to be bleak as well. It’s not about the majesty of space; it is the cold, wet, dark atmosphere of the Alien films, where the long voyage across the stars is a means to an end, a job that you take to provide for your family back on Earth, and the whole journey is spent dreaming about getting back home. It is the geopolitical nightmare of The Expanse, where factions based on location hate each other due to “the harshness of space physics.”
Science fiction rarely transcends the issues of the times. We rarely see pieces of work like Iain Banks’s The Culture, a post-scarcity setting where technology is unabashedly good. Instead, we often see variations of The Torment Nexus, or even stories where humans create something amazingly good but it's actually bad and we should never strive toward any progress.
What we need are better stories about the future. We need spaceships that are fun to be on, that have windows and libraries and warm coffee, not the cold desolating experience found in Alien or the bleak future that Blade Runner paints for its audience, where it is always raining and life is probably pretty bad for most people.
We need a category of story that focuses on space solutionism, like a solarpunk or lunarpunk equivalent. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired the previous generation about space travel. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar inspired my generation. The next generation needs a positive future depicted for them.