I grew up on Golden Age SF too, though in the 80s and 90s midwest a long ways from the visible machinery of the space program. The stuff is baked pretty deeply into how I understand the world.
It seems to me like a lot of this discussion misses the ambivalence and awareness of potential catastrophe that’s always been an important strain in SF, and a major determinant in so much of it. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, the stuff in the classic Groff Conklin anthologies, Bradbury, Bester, Herbert, Zelazny, PK Dick, Niven, Lester del Rey, Ursula Le Guin, Lovecraft, Spider Robinson, Orwell, Haldeman, Harry Harrison, John Brunner, David Brin… These people worked at very different times and places in the cultural landscape, but to me as a kid they were all part of the same conversation, and it was a conversation with some really somber themes just as often as it was one defined by anything like triumphalist futurism.
Even guys like Heinlein and Asimov wrote a lot of futures conditioned by human inability to transcend our worst failings. Children of the 80s grew up with the near-inevitability of a massive, world-crippling nuclear exchange as part of the cultural background radiation in part because it had been so thoroughly explored in the literature of the imagination since at least the end of WWII. (Hell, Heinlein wrote “Solution Unsatisfactory” in 1940.)
I guess I don’t really share the sense that the capital-F Future has gone away. I’m as nostalgic for a certain vision of it as anyone, and there are a lot of things we could stand to recapture. It’s maddening in particular the extent to which our culture has turned its back on a serious discussion of space. But I’m also constantly struck by how SFnal the present we occupy has become: How many times in a given week you can look around go “well, it’s the Science Fiction Future now”. Which is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes terrifying and sometimes both. The trick is that there was never only one such Future, and the one we happen to be occupying looks more like the ones Gibson was writing in the early 80s than it does a lot of the alternatives. (“We’re all living in a William Gibson novel” has become such a commonplace over the last few years that I couldn’t even tell you approximately where I first heard it. The idea is everywhere.)
Add to this mix a multi-billion-dollar environmental industry that survives only by scaring the bejebus out of people
I’m consistently amazed at the level of enviroskepticism people bring to the comments here, though maybe I shouldn’t be. I don’t want to suggest that there aren’t plenty of people making money off of seedy greenwashing and general “buy this in compensation for your sins against the planet!” undertakings, but for a major subset of educated, technically-minded people to treat concerns about the health of the only biosphere we’ve got as simple fearmongering is not doing anyone any favors. I’m worried in part because a literature obsessed with the future gave me a framework for understanding that technological decisions have consequences, that the status quo never lasts, that the timescale of an individual human life is minute in comparison to the vast sweep of history, and that the extraordinary – for better or worse – can and will happen.