This looks like pretty normal code. What is all the “space shuttle” stuff about?

The only unusual things I see are a) 8-space indentation, b) lots of “if err { return nil }”, and c) lots of comments.

Aren’t a) and b) standard for Go? How else is it possible to write Go code?

With less verbose error handling and 2- or 4- space indentation it wouldn’t look especially “branchy”.