Space Art?!

*apparently I didn't post this last night, throwing it up now

As a small group of friends and I  gathered together outside tonight to watch the first successful privatitized cargo rocket launch into space, I was struck at how little interest there was in the neighborhood. Even when it started and we all had a crazy excited smiles painted on our faces, people casually walking by seemed completely unphased. At first I assumed perhaps they knew what we were looking at but just didn't care. Which could be the explanation, but I know if I passed a bunch of people looking up into the sky I'd at least take a peek. The lack of interest in space is completely lost on me. I know there are more prevalent problems here on earth, which I feel is a lot of people's rational for not caring about it. However, space exploration isn't just another problem we need to work on, it's more of an undiscovered territory to explore. I often think that maybe some of the problems we face today could be solved or worked on if we all took a step back, INTO SPACE!
My brother is a aerospace engineer and worked for nasa when their budget was slashed in half. It pushed a lot of scientists into privatized companies. This seemed to be mostly because pop-culture doesn't care about space, therefore it creates no income. The government has never been the best at promoting things. I often said to my brother, that all NASA needs is a better PR department or someone to translate these discoveries into relatable content for people to get excited about. Which led me to wonder if there were any artists who dealt with outer space in particular. Most featured in a Google search are paintings remisnicent of American and Soviet propaganda during the Space Race. While interesting, very few go very far into the future. Most have a man made structure in space, that's either a straight representation of what exists or a slightly augmented view of what the near future holds. When I typed in "Space Art" I honestly expected kind of cheesy paintings or clinical photographs taken with a telescope. And that's pretty much what I got. Although, some were spectacular artist renderings of space landscapes with edited color and light; so the human eye can fathom what is in space that we cannot physically see. Space seems to be a huge new source of inspiration for art. It is obviously being utilized in movies. Films like "Interatellar" have taken advantage of this new frontier. "Firefly" and "Battlestar Galactica" superimposes our history into a new landscape to point out how human history is a cycle of redistributing humanity and how it comes back together. Although, if you look at movies and entertainment involving space currently, the theme has changed significantly. Space used to be about exploration and getting out to see something unknown. But more recently, the theme of these movies has changed to reflect an urgency of returning to Earth or escaping space. Our art is also reflecting our attitude to abandon space.
So, I was thinking, keeping with the need to make our art as something to express our passions, perhaps no one really cares about space. Or perhaps it's all too scientific and technical right now to invite more artistic representations. But I know I think it's fascinating, so I will definitely add it to my list of subject matter for work. Perhaps I can try to pull people into an area of thought that we only seem to be able to focus on if there is some sort of winning involved. And express such infinite possibilities that the landscape provides us as artists and human beings.