This is really stupid, but do you know any good music you associate with retro space heroing?
How lucky are we that Vangelis did the soundtrack to Blade Runner? It’s the perfect merger of style to topic.
When I think of science fiction, I think of Alan Parsons’ instrumentals, like “Sirius” and “Hyper Gamma Space.” There’s also the works of Klaus Schultze, of course. Anything with lyrics strikes me as feeling “wrong” for science fiction.
Anyone who exists in that space between ambient and progressive rock would be great science fiction music. Tangerine Dream’s 70s work, for example, would work incredibly well. Incidentally, if I had to identify the single most underappreciated and underheard soundtrack for any movie, it would be the Tangerine Dream soundtrack for the movie Legend.
Brian Eno, as much as I love him, blends too much into the background and is too subtle. There’s this great album from the 1970s by an Italian progressive rock group called Automat that gives you the emotional ambience of weird scifi. It’s eerie and unearthly but it’s up-tempo, so it has a pulse of red blood. I absolutely love it:
If you want something a little faster than that with a bit of a groove to get your blood pumping (maybe for the blood and thunder scifi yarns), the scifi, synthesizer sounds of the Yellow Magic Orchestra couldn’t steer you wrong.
Can’t help but mention the Flash Gordon soundtrack by Queen.
And Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive probably deserves to be mentioned.
For more contemporary stuff, I think the Gorillaz could actually work quite well as Space Travel music.