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How space exploration has changed our history
Efforts to explore outer space have influenced the functioning of society in numerous ways since the first Moon landing. Although, in the early days, these increasingly significant breakthroughs were met with boundless optimism, it has become clear in recent years that, despite its many advantages, space exploration also has its darker sides.
As early as the 1970s, space scientists believed that the advancement of science and the passage of time would radically reshape the way society functions through the possibilities offered by space travel, potentially providing solutions to several major global challenges, History Today writes.
We couldn’t live as we do today without satellites
Seven years before Apollo 11’s Moon landing, in 1962, NASA launched its first satellite into space. Today, nearly five thousand such devices orbit the Earth. Without them, not only would the internet and global information networks cease to function, but accurate weather forecasting and navigational systems such as GPS would also be unimaginable. Thanks to the progress of space research, we now possess a vast—though still alarmingly limited—amount of knowledge about how the universe operates.
Although NASA is frequently criticised for what many consider to be an excessively large budget, even at the height of the Apollo programme in the 1960s, its expenditure never exceeded 6% of the US federal budget; today, it typically accounts for around 0.5%.
The moon landing sparked a major leap forward for India
While the two principal players in the space race during the Cold War were the United States and the Soviet Union, India must not be forgotten. Following the two former superpowers and China, it became the fourth nation to successfully land on the Moon.
Struggling for decades with population and economic challenges, the Asian country launched its own space programme in 1962—around the same time as the first satellites were sent into orbit—with the goal of placing national development at its core. After six decades of research, India reached a historic milestone in 2023, when the Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft successfully landed its crew on the Moon’s southern hemisphere for the first time.
Thanks to the exceptional cost-efficiency and scientific achievements of its space programme, India now boasts the world’s seventh-largest communications satellite fleet, opening up new opportunities for education, healthcare, and agriculture in the country’s most remote regions.
Science fiction has always been in dialogue with space exploration
Another sign of how profoundly space exploration has influenced our world lies in the rise of science fiction—both culturally and socially. Behind fiction, after all, there is always a trace of science.
In the early 20th century, stories such as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds offered visions of space and interplanetary travel that seemed entirely out of reach. But as scientists achieved greater breakthroughs, technological advances began to open up new creative paths for filmmakers and writers alike.
With the advent of rockets and various spacecraft, space fiction entered mass culture and became a mirror reflecting social issues. From the 1960s onwards, topics such as racism, nuclear war, and the dangers of artificial intelligence featured prominently in works like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, and the Alien films. By the mid-1980s, thanks to Star Wars, space travel had become an everyday topic of conversation.
From hopeful dream to harsh reality?
Although certain cultural works helped inspire the early stages of space exploration, it was primarily military and strategic interests that defined its framework.
In the early 20th century, many—including the Russian cosmologist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky—believed that once space travel became a reality, social inequalities would cease to exist, since in the vast emptiness of space, neither wealth nor origin would matter.
Yet these fundamentally optimistic ideas began to collapse as soon as the long-cherished dream started to materialise.
Even during the Cold War, the space race represented nothing more than a new dimension of the arms race—and today it is equally clear that space exploration has created yet another arena in which social inequalities are reproduced. Travelling to space remains prohibitively expensive, accessible only to a privileged few—and it is likely to stay that way for quite some time.