I've been thinking about starfield's "nasapunk" thing and like that's a dumb ass name for the aesthetic, but I feel like there is something of value in there. For one it's pretty interesting that the entire bit seems to be taking military realist scifi and removing the military elements, which is a pretty fascinating vision of the future and where power lies in said future. And unlike other retrofuturistic aesthetic revivals like, ray gun gothic or alien style 70s industrial scifi, the nasa aesthetic is not the a past generation's 𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 of the future, it was an element of present reality in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s when stuff like the space shuttle and the iss were actively being developed and in the news all the time, but then stopped being a reality when public science funding evaporated in the late aughts. And I don't think starfield is really going to interrogate the loaded context of it's cool spaceship go brr aesthetic, but it's also an interesting who else is getting in on this aesthetic cause it's just like starfield, the "realistic(?)" buzz lightyear reboot that nobody saw, and matt damon's the martian, i guess? Like there's something here, but so far the only people compelled enough by the nasa aesthetic are so milquetoast and uninterested in the deeper implications of this nostalgia-futurism.
i'd almost call it function-first-futurism, where you get things that are designed for practicality first
but i haven't seen enough of starfield to speak to it. The real term for it, if you want to find the good art and the good discourse around it, would generally be cassettepunk/cassette futurism
