Well maybe yes, if you take the path that everything will be hunky dory when the SpaceBrat grows up as an Ubermench and saves us all from OURSELVES. But I for one do not see that as I look into the eyes of "Old Blue Eyes is Back" [a ref of course to the comings and goings of Kranky Franky Sinatra].
And the sky itself is not blue [the inspiration for the ELO song]. However there are some great vibes there given ELO wrote it on a walk in the woods in Swiss Alps, as was the case 100 years before when Nietzsche got his inspiration for Zarathustra, the theme of which is used in ASO to signify monolithic moments.
But I prefer a different ELO Blue song [along with David Bowie's Space Oddity], so please take a look and I'll explain.
"A song about an all-conquering hero from the middle ages." — Jeff Lynne (Eldorado Remaster, 2001).
The song is an anti-war song set during the Crusades and forms the second dream as part of the overall Eldorado dreamscape. It tells a story about a hero returning from a far off war and the rapturous welcome he received from his town folk. Boy Blue (the character of the song) rebuffs the hero worship and declares his hatred of war and stating his refusal to ever take up arms again. To those in the military in the early 1970s, it was set in their lives, in a war far too near.
As one of those fitting the category of the last sentence, AGAINST my will, I don't even need to confirm from Full Metal Jacket Kubrick's disdain for America's treatment of young men "required to take up arms" - I can see it on Dave's face as he arrives "home" to "the biggest piece of nothing in history" [to use the FF Coppola expression].
It is almost as if in 1969 Kubrick has forecast how in 1970s HAL would pull the Napalm Girl gig, J Doe would fall for it and we "returning heroes" would be spat on.
Dave dies, the mission was a failure and Kubrick gives us Boy Blue as a sort of embryo in a planet of his/her own, so my take on that is that one may take it as they wish, ie the baby Jesus icon as hope for the "New World" or a "Rosemay's Baby" type AntiChrist.
If asked to choose which I would say it has to be the latter for the simple reason Kubrick shows there WAS no welcome home as there were no people left, and a secondary item of evidence is Kubrick has staged the whole movie [even down to the very year 2001] in line with Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, where the final scene has a similar brave American returning from "Jupiter and Beyond" to find nothing left.
Or in other words, per David Bowie:
"Planet Earth is blue
and there's nothing I can do"
