One of my favourite often space-themed producers is Murcof.
I think his best album is Martes, which is a sombre mixture of minimal glitchy Techno and modern classical, a wonderful Sci-Fi night-time album that nobody seems to like as much as I do.
There is just something about it that gets me, it feels both warm and cold, depressing yet comforting. Whirrs, pops and clicks and haunting strings, it sounds like old memories and creaky doors and if Burial was actually an android stranded in outer space without his sample pack of vinyl crackles and vocal snippets.
And from his album Cosmos, is the track Cuerpo Celeste (Celestial Body). This is the track that I always will think of when talking floating in space (besides Spiritualized).
The track does start out cold and empty, not much is happening. It sounds like an abandoned ship floating aimlessly in space, the shattered fragments of the dreams of crew members like a sad exploded jigsaw unable to be complete without guidance. Cold winds. Signs of light but nothing forms. Millions of years pass.
At 4:10, something is brewing. There appears to be a revolt in the inanimate and structure is forming, a pattern in chaos.
At 5:40 there is life. The pieces miraculously fit together causing an explosion of everything, temples of knowledge marked in glyphs that were always there span through dimensions with halls further than the mind can fathom and it is beautiful. There is also a vampire and he teaches the secrets through his organ.
But the fanfare is gone as suddenly as it appeared. The party of everything hurtled forward and left behind the nothing it once was, a blip in time.
ANYWAY.
Despite the vocal sample, I do not think Ladies and Gentlemen is particularly spacey. There are others they have done which are more space-like, such as Always Forgetting With You.
And it would be almost rude to not mention Biosphere's Lush alien cat purrs, (MIR, from his album Patashnik my other favourite space album).
So what makes good space music? There are bands and composers that can do it well, I do love Space Rock, Krautrock, earlier Ambient, Steve Roach, Vangelis, Ashra, and some modern Electronic producers take the crown with even more focus on synthesizers and experimentation of them than a "trippy" solo or wailing, bendy guitars of Floyd etc.
Thinking of Sci Fi in film and television of course you have composers like John Williams doing Star Wars and Strauss for 2001, but there is something about the bleeps, the pads, arpeggios of synthesizers in the old Star Trek, Hitchhiker's Guide, Blade Runner, etc that I think gives more of a genuine space/science fiction aesthetic rather than a bombastic explosion of action scene.
A lot of synthesizers also look like space ship control desks.
Dave Smith PolyEvolver
Roland Jupiter XM
Prophet 5
Yamaha CS-80