On Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence, head of the National Space Council, outlined plans for creating the “Space Force” that President Donald Trump envisions as a space-dedicated military branch, complete with space warfighters and weapons, by the year 2020.

Leaving planet Earth isn’t easy. This year, NASA’s Astronaut Candidate Program received a record 18,000-plus applications from highly qualified scientists bent on discovering space’s deep abyss. It will choose a handful, if that.

In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number of audio clips, including (amongst others) Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night. Projected onto a double-sided, cinema-sized screen, these images – but not the audio clips – are the basis of Steve McQueen’s solo show ‘Once Upon a Time’. The images range from photographs of children being born to family portraits, the monumental (Jupiter) to the miniature (a leaf), and the poetic (a sunset with birds) to the mechanical (a calibration circle). There are ordnance photographs of the Sinai Peninsula and an intimate portrait of a nursing mother. Ethnographic portraits, perhaps inevitably, feature too and, despite the generally auspicious and upbeat tone of the Golden Record, there are also premonitions of more immediate concerns:

In preparing paintings for the exhibition, the head of oil painting conservation noticed usual things about some of them, prompting her to X-ray, among others, 'A view of Pickersgill Harbour, Dusky Bay'.

It was discovered that the rainforest gives way to a startlingly different view – of Antarctic icebergs in a rough sea. Clearly, Hodges had painted the Antarctic and then decided for whatever reason to paint over it – the only known 'oil painting' of the Antarctic.

Selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, these songs were etched into a 12-inch, gold-plated copper record that was placed aboard the two spaceships in 1977

Fold out, fold out again. Observe the organs: flank or groin, lumbar vertebrae, jejunum and deum