“Make Space Great Again”
Nostalgic Amnesia on the Final Frontier
While delivering a speech to US Marines in March of 2018, Donald Trump made the following seemingly off-the-cuff, yet consequential, remark:
You know, I was saying it the other day cause we’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space… I said “maybe we need a new force, we’ll call it the space force.” And I was not really serious, and then I said “what a great idea, maybe we’ll have to do that.”
Later that year in October, Kanye West visited the White House. Attracting a great deal of PR, he presented custom hats to Trump and his family. Of particular note were the hats that he gave to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner— reading “Make Earth Great Again” and “Travel Space Again”—which played on the slogan Make American Great Again (MAGA). Just over a year later, Trump signed the Space Force into law within the larger 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. This was closely followed by his Executive Order claiming US space mining rights, in spite of previous international treaties.
Why was Trump insistent on creating a new branch of the military, especially when it went against the wishes of so many in the Pentagon? Why does its logo look so similar to Star Trek’s Starfleet Command? Furthermore, why do so many current private outer space ventures draw on nostalgia for the same era that Trump valorizes as “great”?
I argue that what ties these together is a broader nostalgic amnesia for the 1950s and 60s, stripped of historical context and idealized as a period of endless potential. I trace how the nostalgia that animates Trump, MAGA, and the Space Force parallels that of current ventures by the billionaire space class, often referred to as “NewSpacers” by scholars such as David Valentine.
In Lisa Messeri’s ethnography Placing Outer Space, she describes the importance of nostalgia for planetary scientists scanning the cosmos for habitable exoplanets:
The search for an Earth-like planet is shot through with nostalgia — nostalgia in the precise sense of acute homesickness. Though much, perhaps impossible, work would be required to undertake a “journey home” to the Earth of the past that we think we recall, we can, perhaps, find an exoplanet that reminds us of an Earth more habitable than today’s or the future’s Earth. The search for a habitable planet is nostalgia for an Earth we have never known. It is a search for an idealized home.
Indeed, nostalgia is an aching for the loss of something pure and past. Mad Men’s Don Draper (during the height of the MAGA era) depicts nostalgia as “the pain from an old wound. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone… [It] isn’t a space ship. It’s a time machine… It takes us to a place where we ache to go again… to a place where we know we are loved.”
Most nostalgia involves some amount of distorting the past. When taken to extremes, however, it radically transforms the past through nostalgic amnesia, which Orlando Lee Rodriguez notes is when “the past, no matter how dysfunctional or painful, somehow becomes better than the present.” This is not a nostalgia for the past itself, but rather for the imagined unlimited futures that are projected onto this era. Or, as French poet and essayist Paul Valéry distills it,
“The future isn’t what it used to be.”
Both MAGA and NewSpacer imaginaries are soaked through with nostalgic amnesia. The Mad Men era of the 50s and 60s is not only what Trump calls for his supporters to harken back to, but it also represents the zenith of outer space accomplishment and optimism. Trump’s imagery of this era invokes a mythical middle-class American dream of endless white picket fences and well-paying jobs.
However, just as Trump’s rhetoric erases the deeply problematic aspects of this era, so too does nostalgia for the golden era of space exploration. It omits the extreme social injustice of this period, including structural racism within NASA (as illustrated in the book and film Hidden Figures). It also ignores the fact that the space race itself was a technological and symbolic military battle between nuclear superpowers during a Cold War that brought humanity to the brink of annihilation.
There has long been a conflation of the militaristic and romantic aspects of space exploration. For example, when Star Trek first aired in 1966 it was four short years after JFK’s “we choose to go to the moon” speech and only three years before the Apollo 11 moon landing. It represented a utopian and Euro-centric federation of spacefaring in the “final frontier.” Thus, it is no accident that the current Space Force logo so closely imitates that of Star Trek’s Starfleet Command, or that the Space Force recruiting commercial is at times difficult to distinguish from the Space Force satire on Netflix.
As Chloe Ahmann and Vincent Ialenti point out, Trump’s slogan is more about the “make” than the “great.” So too is present action essential for NewSpacers. They are laser-focused on what to do in the present to address unfulfilled past promises for cosmic futures. Performing this nostalgia is essential for asserting that this matters, that they matter, and that they will call into being the future they are entitled to.
Nostalgia was especially apparent in Jeff Bezos’ 2019 unveiling of Blue Origin’s moon lander, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Apollo lunar lander from 50 years prior.
Elon Musk—the founder of SpaceX and the most influential NewSpacer—is especially known for his nostalgic tendencies. For example, he based the Tesla Cybertruck on the 1977 Lotus Espirit/submarine car from the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. Like Bezos, his nostalgia also applies to space ventures. Starship, the steel-clad SpaceX ship that Musk hopes will transport people to Mars, looks like a Burning Man-esque homage to rockets from 1950’s science fiction films such as Destination Moon.
As with the majority of MAGA supporters, leading NewSpacers are made up of white males that serve as avatars for the self-made man mythos: neoliberal heroes, space cowboys who have pulled themselves up by their space bootstraps. Indeed, a sense of lost masculinity is palpable in both of these groups, with NewSpacers longing for the days of test pilot astronauts with “the right stuff.” They also sell grown-up toys such as flamethrowers (read: space Remingtons) about which Musk noted, “obviously, a flamethrower is a super terrible idea…definitely don’t buy one…unless you like fun.”
Furthermore, NewSpacer discussions about the purpose of space exploration betray more than a touch of loneliness, as though there is some deep fulfillment that eludes them on Earth. Musk often states that exploring and living on other planets should be about more than solving problems, noting here that:
There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.
This ennui is also reflected in Hollywood cinema. There is a long history of lost-in-space leading white men starring in films such as Gravity, The Martian, Ad Astra, Interstellar, and the iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Echoing Musk’s existential angst, these protagonists are not seeking adventure so much as redemption for their alienation from family and self. They ache to resurrect what has already been consigned to oblivion. This is visually represented by empty expressions gazing into the void, as panel lights reflect off of their spacesuit visors while they ponder self-sacrifice, mortality, and the one thing that they have left: completing their mission.
Nostalgic amnesia is certainly not the only motivation for current space ventures. Indeed, younger generations are less likely to be motivated by such nostalgia (though I myself feel a touch of this from childhood space ice cream and space shuttle toys). However, for the older generation of NewSpacers, it is a key factor worth considering in light of their disproportionate influence over mission goals and resource allocation.
Outer space imaginaries also animate larger public understandings of humanity’s shifting place within and beyond Earth. Carl Sagan’s poetic writing on the pale blue dot image inspired a generation to imagine how fragile and precious our planet is, including the following passage:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
In contrast to this overview effect, the ultraview effect (as coined by Deana Weibel) is what astronauts describe as a quasi-religious wonder induced by the vast multitudes of stars when viewed from space.
While Sagan’s words encourage us to temper heroic stories of past human deeds by emphasizing the fragility of a singular and precious Earth, NewSpacers tend to imagine a ceaseless final frontier promising personal, social, and species redemption—made possible by a profound nostalgic amnesia encompassing the entirety of colonial history.
Indeed, such redemption is projected onto innumerable potential second Earths, which serve as proxies for second chances. Such willful mirages trivialize the importance of our one and only planet, while drawing on the same confident logic at the heart of nearly all colonial endeavors.
They represent countless possibilities to start over, to leave behind all failures, to exorcise all demons. The promise that somehow we won’t make the same mistakes again. That we can get it right this time. That we can rekindle the embers of a delicate, yet potent, feeling of childhood wonder.
That paradise lost, can be found once again, in dark and distant places.
