The Dreams of ‘Star Trek’ Aren’t Dead

In April, a handful of humans boldly went where no one has gone before. The four-person crew of NASA’s Artemis II mission broke the record set by Apollo 13, back in 1970, traveling more than 406,000 kilometers from Earth. Billionaire-funded space missions have sent Katy Perry and William Shatner into space (courtesy of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin) and launched a flying car (Elon Musk’s SpaceX). NASA offered a more sober and heartfelt vision of what space could be: an earnest and representative crew; the commemoration of the commander’s late wife; the stark beauty of a total solar eclipse; the reminders of NASA’s rich heritage; the promise of future lunar surface missions. Sometimes, the slow, steady footage sent back to us seemed like communications from another world—the past, perhaps, or a