But now focus will shift away from Silicon Valley and toward defense, cybersecurity, and old-fashioned heavy industry. If early rhetoric—and staffing choices— are any indicator, the new administration will seek to reshape the directions these innovations take and to what end they are developed. Users might ask themselves: Is a new sensor system designed to manage traffic, or surveil it? Does this new drone looking for drought-stricken forests, or is it an eye in the sky for DHS?

Speaking at a rally in Florida in late October, Trump declaimed how he would free NASA from its “restriction of serving primarily as a logistics agency for low-earth orbit activities—big deal!” The proposed defunding of the agency’s climate-science program has already angered the scientific community. But in Trump’s narrative, once it’s unshackled from the collective global goals of climate science, NASA will be free to “Make America First Again” in space exploration.

Bob Walker, a senior Trump advisor, has staked the claim that new administration would have a “stretch goal” of exploring the entire solar system by the end of the century. These claims clumsily grab at the language of crowdfunding campaigns while mimicking the moonshot one-upmanship exemplified by Jeff Bezos promising commercial spaceflight by 2018, or Elon Musk proffering manned missions to Mars by 2022. Right now, this new space program seems less like innovation policy and more like spectacle and hustle, making nice with swing-state Florida while riding a red-baseball-hatted rocket to infinity and beyond.

Where does that leave us? The outcome of this redirection may be a near-future for the West that essentially re-entrenches crony capitalism, where big construction projects replace Big Data as an engine for exacerbating inequality. Will Elon Musk let SpaceX’s serve as a military enabler in low-Earth orbit in order to keep Tesla going? Do Amazon, Google, and Apple join Thiel’s Palantir in providing explicit products for the Department of Homeland Security? Or do the tech oligarchs gang together to provide their own counter-infrastructure? If so, whom do they serve?

Last month, an op-ed in the The Wall Street Journal dismissed the Obama administration’s green regulations as destructive. Its author compared the president’s allegedly willful decision to ignore fracking to opting out of the internet revolution. Expect the reverse of that in the years to come: Early signals suggest that Trump’s economic strategy will seek to revive past glories and put relatively “dumb” technologies like fracking ahead of energy, or mobile-internet, innovations.

This could forestall or block the development of a domestic clean-energy or electric-vehicle economy, choosing a different future for the U.S. than has been sold for the past decade. The vision of that future made the country a laboratory and test-bed for the new—America as a broad-based, technologically advanced bellwether. But that dream is now being guided into an unexpected parking space, keys left on the dash. What replaces it is a loud, red vintage muscle car, with an uncertain destination.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Scott Smith is a forecaster, writer, teacher and head of futures research lab Changeist. Connect Twitter