When the 1997 comedy Austin Powers needed a song to send up the swinging ’60s in its joyfully absurd opening sequence, the movie could have opted for obvious touchstones, such as British-invasion rock or sitar-drenched psychedelia. Instead, it used an offbeat bit of samba-jazz by Quincy Jones. This was an inspired choice. Jones’s 1962 song “Soul Bossa Nova” was certainly an artifact of its decade, reflecting a then-emerging international craze for Brazilian rhythms. But the track was more than just a time capsule; its hooting percussion and saucy flutes exploded from the speakers in a way that still sounds original, even alien, decades later.

Jones, the legendary polymath who died at age 91 on Sunday, spent a lifetime making music like this—music that defined its era by transcending it. He’s best associated with the gleaming, lush sound of jazz and pop in the ’70s and ’80s, as most famously heard on Michael Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. But his impact was bigger than any one sound or epoch, as Jones used his talent and expertise to design a future we’re still catching up to.

Jones was born into wretched conditions in Depression-era Chicago: His mother was sent to a mental hospital when he was 7, leaving him to be temporarily raised by a grandmother who was so poor that she cooked rats to eat. When Jones was 11, after his family moved to Washington State, he and his brother broke into a building looking for food and came across a piano; playing around with the instrument lit a fire in the young Jones. He’d spend his teenage years hanging out with Ray Charles and playing trumpet with the Count Basie Orchestra; at age 20, he started touring the world as a member of Lionel Hampton’s big band. After producing Dinah Washington’s 1955 album, For Those in Love, he went to Paris to study under the famed classical-music teacher Nadia Boulanger, who’d also tutored Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

These early brushes with genius—and global travels that exposed him to far-flung musical traditions—gave him the skills he’d draw on for the rest of his life. Boulanger, Jones would often later say, drilled into him an appreciation for the endless possibilities contained within the confines of music theory. Mastery, she told him, lay in understanding how previous greats had creatively used the same 12 notes available to everyone else. Jones took this idea to heart. His work was marked by a blend of compositional rigor and freedom; knowing what had come before allowed him to arrange familiar sounds in ways that were, in one way or another, fresh.

Take, for example, Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s My Party,” which Jones produced. The song is a key text of mid-century girl-group pop—Phil Spector tried to take the song for the Crystals—but what made it soar were the Jonesian touches: harmonic decisions that feel ever so off, Latin syncopation pulsing throughout. You can hear similarly eclectic, colorful elements in another American standard that Jones arranged: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie’s 1964 version of “Fly Me to the Moon” (which Buzz Aldrin listened to before stepping onto the lunar surface in 1969).  

Though schooled by classical academics and jazz insiders, Jones seemed to have a pop soul: He used precise technique not to impress aficionados but to convey emotion in an accessible, bold way. “The Streetbeater,” the theme song for Sanford & Sons, used prickly, interlaced percussion to conjure sizzling excitement; a tempo change in “Killer Joe,” from Jones’s 1969 album, Walking in Space, opened up an oasis of cooling flute. The 1985 African-famine-relief anthem “We Are the World” was a particularly gracious use of talent. Not just any producer could have brought 46 vocalists—including such distinctive voices as Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner—into one coherent, catchy whole.

Jones’s signature collaborator was Michael Jackson. It was a kinship that made sense: The two men shared a knack for rhythm, a sense of history, and perfectionism. “He had a perspective on details that was unmatched,” Jones said of Jackson in a 2018 GQ interview. “His idols are Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, all of that. And he paid attention, and that’s what you’re supposed to do.” For all of Jackson’s scandals and eccentricities, the music he made with Jones has never been overshadowed. The songs are just too intricately lovely, delighting hips and hearts and heads all at once, to be denied.

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As Jones settled into living-icon status, he tried to pass his wisdom to new generations. In 1992, he founded the hip-hop magazine Vibe; in 2017, he launched Qwest TV, a streaming service for videos of jazz performances. He kept working with young talents, such as Amy Winehouse in 2010 and the avant-pop composer Jacob Collier much more recently. Even so, later in life, Jones liked to gripe about the state of pop music. In his view, modern artists weren’t educated or broad-minded enough to break new ground. “Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain,” he told New York magazine in 2018. “Music is emotion and science.” He added, “Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?”

Yet clearly, he still has disciples today—though perhaps some of them are misunderstanding his lessons, trying nostalgically to imitate his work rather than studying his techniques to create something different. I feel, for example, conflicted about the Weeknd, a pastiche-y pop star who’s obsessed with recapturing the magic of Jones and Jackson’s hot streak. Jones himself appeared on an interlude on the Weeknd’s 2022 release, Dawn FM. He relayed a story about childhood trauma rippling throughout his adult life, and concluded by saying, “Looking back is a bitch, isn’t it?” The point, he seemed to say, was to use the past to keep moving forward.

If NASA’s current schedule sticks, the next American president will oversee the first moon landing since the Apollo era and preside over the agency’s plans for sending astronauts deeper into the solar system. Elon Musk, the CEO of the world’s most successful private-spaceflight company, has made clear who he thinks that president should be. This fall, he declared that Kamala Harris would doom humankind to an earthbound existence, whereas Donald Trump would fulfill SpaceX’s founding dream of putting people on Mars. Trump seems equally enthusiastic about Musk’s space plans. “Elon, get those rocket ships going, because we want to reach Mars before the end of my term,” he said on the campaign trail.

A Trump presidency could push America toward a new era of space travel, and Trump has demonstrated his enthusiasm for space exploration—as president, he created the Space Force. Otherworldly ambitions, though, can come with earthly costs.

The American government is already relying on SpaceX to fly astronauts to space, provide satellite internet for operations across the U.S. military, and help realize its plans to return to the moon. A Trump administration could increase that codependence, further embedding SpaceX—and its CEO—in the framework of American governance. NASA has always used private companies to fulfill its greatest ambitions, but Trump could essentially outsource the imagination driving the future of American spaceflight to Musk.

No matter who is president, Musk will play a role in America’s future in space. NASA has hired SpaceX to develop a version of Starship, its biggest rocket yet, to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the end of the decade. The agency will also likely rely on the vehicle to make its Mars dreams a reality in the decade after that. SpaceX has launched Starship prototypes steadily over the past year from its South Texas base, and seeks to dramatically increase its annual cadence of test flights, from five to 25. But according to Musk and other company officials, the Federal Aviation Administration, which is responsible for approving rocket launches, is holding them back from testing Starship and sending commercial payloads into orbit as quickly as they’d like. FAA officials have defended the agency’s process for launch evaluations, saying that SpaceX—whose Starship project is unlike any previous space program—must meet safety requirements before every takeoff.

[Read: What’s standing in Elon Musk’s way?]

A newly reinstalled President Trump, who once asked NASA to hurry up and squeeze in a Mars mission before the end of his first term, would presumably take no issue with a pressure campaign against his own FAA to remove regulations. He could instruct the agency to relax its rules, even give Musk some (official or unofficial) power over it. Trump has promised to instate Musk as the head of a government-efficiency commission. Such an appointment could lead to all sorts of conflicts of interest, and perhaps even unprecedented results. “You have potentially a high-level senior adviser in the person who owns the largest and most capable private space company in the world, with a direct line to the president of the United States, pitching a Mars mission in four years,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, who has written extensively about the politics of America’s moon and Mars efforts, told me. “We don’t have historical examples of that.” (NASA could not make agency officials available for an interview before this story was published.)

Unshackled from the FAA, SpaceX could run dozens of Starship missions in the next few years, which is exactly what NASA needs in order to start dropping astronauts on the moon and beyond (and achieving those feats before rival nations do). Space travel is an itch that the United States, under any president, seems unable to resist scratching. “We do it because we can—and because we probably will not be satisfied until we do,” John Logsdon, a space historian, once told me. Musk has long argued that the future of the human species depends on reaching Mars. Government officials may not use the same vocabulary as Musk, but they have bought into his vision nonetheless. In recent years, former top officials in NASA’s human-spaceflight program have taken jobs at SpaceX.

In the meantime, though, more SpaceX flights—and more power for Musk—could be messy, or even dangerous. As Starship development has quickened in recent years, SpaceX’s rate of worker injuries has outpaced the industry average. Federal and state regulators say that SpaceX has disregarded environmental rules at its launch site in South Texas, violating the Clean Water Act by releasing industrial wastewater during launches. (The company has said that the water is not hazardous.) And perhaps most concerning, where a Trump administration could clear hurdles for SpaceX, it could also embolden the company’s chief executive, a man whose conduct is often questionable at best. Recent reports alleging that Musk engages in regular conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin led NASA’s chief to call for an investigation.

NASA has previously acted in response to comparatively mild Musk antics; in 2018, the agency ordered a review of workplace culture at SpaceX, which was preparing to fly NASA astronauts on a brand-new spacecraft, after Musk smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The Trump administration didn’t stand in the way of that investigation, but that was before Musk became the former president’s No. 1 donor and certified hype man. A Putin-related inquiry under a second Trump administration is unlikely. Trump, who has praised the Russian dictator and refused to vocally support Ukraine, would sooner hop on a three-way phone call with Musk and Putin. Already, with SpaceX’s growing inventory of Starlink internet satellites, Musk has tremendous control over how the world communicates, and has maintained Starlink’s independence from the U.S. government and others. But if President Trump asks Government-Efficiency Adviser Musk to, say, shut off Starlink services over a NATO ally or a nuclear power, one wonders how Musk would react.

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A Harris administration would, of course, approach Musk differently. Musk has publicly mused about why no one has attempted to assassinate Harris and suggested that Harris would order his arrest if she wins the presidency. That’s far-fetched, even if a Harris administration might be less reluctant to investigate the billionaire’s ties to Putin. And no matter who takes the White House, to spurn SpaceX would mean hurting the U.S. space program. Boeing bungled its recent mission to ferry astronauts to the ISS so badly that SpaceX has at least a temporary monopoly over astronaut launches from American soil.

The American space program needs Musk, and he knows it. Without SpaceX, NASA astronauts could fly around the moon a dozen times and never touch down: NASA’s own rocket is supposed to get them into lunar orbit, but Starship is their ride to the surface. That leverage raises a worrying—if unlikely—possibility. Earlier this year, Musk told my colleague Damon Beres that he is willing to accept a Harris presidency, but only “if, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins.” Dreier suggested this hypothetical scenario: “What if Elon Musk just declared SpaceX won’t work with the Harris administration if he considers it illegitimate?” (Musk is certainly laying the groundwork for election denial—it appears to be his primary preoccupation on X these days.) Although such a decision would put SpaceX in breach of various contracts and cause tremendous turmoil, it would also make clear who controls American spaceflight.