Paradox Make Space Great Again Hat
"Make Space Great Once more"
Cornball Amnesia on the Final Frontier
While delivering a speech communication to U.s. Marines in March of 2018, Donald Trump fabricated the following seemingly off-the-cuff, however consequential, remark:
You know, I was saying information technology the other 24-hour interval cause we're doing a tremendous amount of work in space… I said "maybe nosotros demand a new force, we'll phone call it the infinite strength." And I was not really serious, and and so I said "what a great thought, maybe nosotros'll take to do that."
After that year in October, Kanye West visited the White House. Attracting a smashing deal of PR, he presented custom hats to Trump and his family unit. Of detail annotation 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 Groovy Again (MAGA). Simply over a year later, Trump signed the Space Force into constabulary within the larger 2020 National Defense Authorization Human activity. This was closely followed by his Executive Guild claiming The states space mining rights, in spite of previous international treaties.
Why was Trump insistent on creating a new branch of the armed services, peculiarly when it went against the wishes of and so many in the Pentagon? Why does its logo look and so like to Star Trek's Starfleet Command? Furthermore, why do and then many current private outer space ventures describe on nostalgia for the same era that Trump valorizes as "great"?
I debate 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 infinite course, frequently referred to every bit "NewSpacers" by scholars such as David Valentine.
In Lisa Messeri'southward 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 exist required to undertake a "journeying home" to the Earth of the past that we call back nosotros call back, nosotros can, mayhap, detect an exoplanet that reminds the states of an Earth more habitable than today'due south or the future's Globe. The search for a habitable planet is nostalgia for an Earth we have never known. Information technology is a search for an idealized habitation.
Indeed, nostalgia is an aching for the loss of something pure and past. Mad Men'south Don Draper (during the peak of the MAGA era) depicts nostalgia equally "the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your eye far more powerful than memory alone… [It] isn't a space send. It's a time motorcar… It takes united states of america to a place where we ache to go again… to a place where nosotros know we are loved."
Most nostalgia involves some corporeality 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 affair how dysfunctional or painful, somehow becomes improve 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 time to come 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 countless white lookout fences and well-paying jobs.
However, just as Trump's rhetoric erases the deeply problematic aspects of this era, and so as well does nostalgia for the golden era of space exploration. It omits the extreme social injustice of this period, including structural racism within NASA (every bit illustrated in the book and film Subconscious Figures). Information technology as well 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 Expedition first aired in 1966 it was four short years after JFK's "we cull to get to the moon" voice communication and merely iii years before the Apollo xi moon landing. It represented a utopian and Euro-centric federation of spacefaring in the "terminal borderland." Thus, information technology is no blow that the current Space Force logo so closely imitates that of Star Trek'due south Starfleet Command, or that the Infinite Force recruiting commercial is at times difficult to distinguish from the Infinite Strength satire on Netflix.
As Chloe Ahmann and Vincent Ialenti point out, Trump's slogan is more about the "brand" than the "not bad." So too is present action essential for NewSpacers. They are light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation-focused on what to do in the present to accost unfulfilled past promises for cosmic futures. Performing this nostalgia is essential for asserting that this matters, that they affair, and that they will call into being the futurity they are entitled to.
Nostalgia was especially credible in Jeff Bezos' 2019 unveiling of Blue Origin's moon lander, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Apollo lunar lander from l years prior.
Elon Musk—the founder of SpaceX and the near influential NewSpacer—is specially known for his nostalgic tendencies. For case, he based the Tesla Cybertruck on the 1977 Lotus Espirit/submarine auto from the James Bond moving-picture show The Spy Who Loved Me. Like Bezos, his nostalgia also applies to space ventures. Starship, the steel-clad SpaceX transport that Musk hopes will transport people to Mars, looks like a Burning Man-esque homage to rockets from 1950'due south science fiction films such as Destination Moon.
Equally with the bulk of MAGA supporters, leading NewSpacers are fabricated upward of white males that serve equally avatars for the cocky-made man mythos: neoliberal heroes, space cowboys who take pulled themselves up by their infinite 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 correct stuff." They likewise sell grown-upwardly toys such as flamethrowers (read: space Remingtons) about which Musk noted, "obviously, a flamethrower is a super terrible thought…definitely don't purchase one…unless you like fun."
Furthermore, NewSpacer discussions about the purpose of space exploration beguile more than a touch of loneliness, as though at that place is some deep fulfillment that eludes them on Globe. Musk often states that exploring and living on other planets should be about more than solving problems, noting hither that:
There have to be reasons that yous get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do y'all want to live? What's the point? What inspires yous? What practice you love about the future? If the future does non include being out at that place among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I detect that incredibly depressing.
This ennui is also reflected in Hollywood movie theater. At that place 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 and then much as redemption for their alienation from family and self. They anguish 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 i 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 experience a touch of this from childhood space water ice cream and space shuttle toys). However, for the older generation of NewSpacers, it is a key factor worth because in light of their disproportionate influence over mission goals and resource allocation.
Outer infinite imaginaries too animate larger public understandings of humanity'due south shifting place within and beyond Earth. Carl Sagan's poetic writing on the pale blueish dot prototype inspired a generation to imagine how fragile and precious our planet is, including the following passage:
Look again at that dot. That's hither. That'due south home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone y'all 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 civilisation, every male monarch and peasant, every immature 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 every bit a quasi-religious wonder induced by the vast multitudes of stars when viewed from infinite.
While Sagan's words encourage united states of america to temper heroic stories of past human deeds by emphasizing the fragility of a atypical and precious Earth, NewSpacers tend to imagine a incessant final frontier promising personal, social, and species redemption—fabricated possible by a profound nostalgic amnesia encompassing the entirety of colonial history.
Indeed, such redemption is projected onto innumerable potential 2nd Earths, which serve as proxies for second chances. Such willful mirages trivialize the importance of our one and only planet, while cartoon on the same confident logic at the heart of nearly all colonial endeavors.
They represent endless possibilities to start over, to exit behind all failures, to exorcise all demons. The promise that somehow we won't brand the same mistakes again. That we can go it correct this fourth dimension. That we tin can rekindle the embers of a frail, nevertheless potent, feeling of babyhood wonder.
That paradise lost, can be found once more, in dark and distant places.
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Source: https://medium.com/space-anthropology/make-space-great-again-9e91bc8aabb5
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