“I Wonder What Mars is Like in the Springtime?” - The Commodification of Modernity in NASA’s Nostalgic Visions of the Future Travel Posters

This dissertation explores the relationship between a recent set of hypothetical space tourism posters released by NASA, called Visions of the Future and the travel posters of the past from which they visually reference, with a specific focus on advertising methods through theories surrounding Nostalgia, Utopia and Modernity.

In contemporary society, the anxieties that surround modernity are just as flagrant as they were at the birth of air travel. Space travel is becoming privatised and new companies have been emerging and entering big development contracts with NASA, which intend on ultimately making commercial space travel a reality. In deconstructing the representations and nostalgic references within Visions of the Future — through visual analysis and theoretical concepts — this dissertation hopes to identify and explore the methods used by NASA in advertising their longing for the future and investigate the effects space travel may have on modernity in contemporary culture.