The space will opera is the kind of science fiction par excellence, which mixes epic adventures, voyages in space and jumps in the hyperspace. Its references to the marine are numerous, space being considered in the space will opera like a shopping street or a battle field.

In Star Wars, the transport of TIE space fighters in imperial cruisers recalls the movements of modern aircraft carriers with their embarked fighters. In the universe of Star Wars, the cruisers which travel in the hyperspace can quickly deploy imperial hunting to subject any seditious system.

Starship Troopers, novel of Robert Heinlein (adapted out of film by Paul Verhoeven), puts in scene a humanity in war counters extraterrestrial insectoids. The author endeavours to describe the military formation of young recruits and their deployment in various companies of infantry, transported in spaceships and unloaded on planets disputed with human by quarrelsome extraterrestrial beings.

The imagery of the spacecraft in the drawing animated Captain Harlock, by Leiji Matsumoto, clearly refers to the various periods of marine: if the design of the buildings of the regular army points out the battleships of the First World War, various influences meet on Captain Harlock's vessel, called Atlantis: the prow holds of the submarine, the gun-lasers are the turrets of a destroyer; as for the worked poop, one would say the back castle of a ship of the line of the 17th century.

In Nova, of Samuel Delany, one discovers through a character, the Mouse, the daily newspaper of the sailors of space, employees to the operation as at the time of the navy with veil on the large commercial buildings which make slackening one or twice per annum in the spatioports. The sailors of Samuel Delany, instead of ropes, operate the spacecraft deflectors, using servomechanisms triggered by their nerve impulse.