Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign has been so addicted to identity politics that it has sliced and diced various groups to support her quest for the White House. White Dudes for Harris and Evangelicals for Harris are two recent examples.

However, the cringiest of all of these groups has to be Space Cadets for Harris, which recently held their fundraising livestream (which starts at 51:30 in the linked video).

Space Cadets for Harris is an eclectic group that includes former astronauts, scientists, Star Trek actors, Poppy Northcutt, a pioneering former female NASA engineer, two former NASA administrators, and Bill Nye.

The term “space cadet” that the group adopted is a little off-putting. The definition of a “space cadet” is “a person who appears to be in their own world or out of touch with reality.”

The case for Kamala Harris presented in the livestream, aside from the fact that she is on the politically correct side of non-space issues such as abortion and education, is based on two premises.

As chairwoman of the National Space Council, Harris is enthusiastic about space. Also, she is going to bring about the future of Star Trek.

Harris is certainly enthusiastic about space, having wholeheartedly embraced former President Donald Trump’s Artemis deep space exploration program. She demonstrated the enthusiasm in a cringey video in which she gushed about all things space to a group of child actors: “You can see the craters of the moon with your own eyes!”

But Harris has been mainly hands-off where space policy is concerned. Two American astronauts are apparently trapped on board the International Space Station because of the Boeing Starliner’s malfunction on her watch.

The connection of Star Trek with Harris is more than a little curious. Star Trek, for those who don’t know, is a TV and movie franchise depicting a future in which human civilization has expanded to the stars. It depicts the adventures of members of a quasi-military branch called Starfleet engaged in space exploration and conflicts with unfriendly aliens such as the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Borg.

The original Star Trek series depicted space adventures with the occasional bit of sly social commentary. More recently, as David Marcus once complained, Star Trek has devolved into woke, far-left virtue signaling at the expense of good storytelling.

What is the Star Trek future that Harris will usher in if she is elected president? It seems to be a kind of high-tech socialism in which money has been abolished along with poverty, bigotry, and a host of other social ills. The Star Trek actors, including Robert Picardo, Jeri Ryan, and Tim Russ, suggested that only Harris can bring about this future.

Trump, on the other hand, will bring about the dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale.

The problem with this premise, which speaks to the definition of space cadet for those who offer it, is that Harris’s preferred policies have already turned San Francisco into a hellscape of homelessness, drug abuse, and rampant crime. California, for which Harris was once an attorney general and a senator, is a dystopia of high crime, crushing taxes, and crazy regulations that have caused many people to flee to more friendly states, such as Texas and Florida.

A Star Trek future under Harris? More like the future of Blade Runner or The Road Warrior.

Besides, Trump has done more to usher in the space adventure aspect of a Star Trek future than Harris could dream of. He started the Artemis program and hired Jim Bridenstine as NASA administrator to sell it. Bridenstine did his work so well that President Joe Biden and Harris adopted it as their own.

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Trump also started the Space Force, a spacefaring military service branch. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a Star Trek fan who named his Texas launch facility Starbase, tweeted at the time, “Star Fleet begins.” One does not get more Trekkie than that. 

The advantage goes to Trump, who Musk endorsed. He may not create a Star Trek utopia, a word which means “nowhere” as coined by Thomas More, but his policies do point to a space future with all that implies.

Mark Whittington, who writes frequently about space policy, has published a political study of space exploration entitled Why is It So Hard to Go Back to the Moon? as well as The Moon, Mars and Beyond, and, most recently, Why is America Going Back to the Moon? He blogs at Curmudgeons Corner.  He is published in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Hill, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, among other venues.