We sure do like our ephemera and our retrofuturism, don’t we? I’d like to promise we’ll lay off the moon stuff eventually, but that would be a bold-faced lie. Bold like the light of space tug on a clear winter’s night. Face like the frown of the man in the moon because the Earthlings are wrecking his buzz. Buzz like Buzz Aldrin, once again, first man to go pee on the moon.

This is what the 80s looked like in 1971.

Check out these images and get lost in Dreams of Space.

I was at a Smithsonian event last year, a talk about space food, during which I learned that astronaut ice cream has only ever been into space once, and that they regularly send the spacepeople up there with a shitload of shrimp cocktail, which is disgusting. Sort it out, NASA. Nobody likes that, and for a futuristic ‘space’ agency, your culinary knowledge would get you laughed out of an Apollo 7 tiki pool party.

The interesting thing was that the woman was speaking about how the space shuttles and space stations can be stocked with food and water, and pretty much admitting that the next moon mission is really just a trial run for a Mars mission, which is really a recon mission for establishing colonies there. I wish I’d recorded it so that in 2025, I could play back the lecture on whatever future-antique I’d used, and we could all have a good laugh. And in the event that this website is still around in 2025 or 2050, then get this: we will not have colonies on Mars anytime soon, but I do feel hopeful about the constant replenishment of future retrofuturist ideas and images. Without anachronism, we’d all be stuck in the far-less-interesting ‘real’ future.

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