Space Age

 ( Spaceflight ) 

The Cold War era competition between the United States and Soviet Union is one of the reasons the space age happened at that time. Since then the space age continues for the generation of scientific knowledge, the innovation and creation of markets, inspiration, and agreements between the space-faring nations. Other reasons for the continuation of the space age are defending Earth from hazardous objects like and .

Much of the technology developed for space applications has been spun off and found additional uses, such as memory foam. In 1958 the United States launched its first satellite, Explorer 1. The same year President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, commonly known as NASA.

Prior to the first attempted human spaceflight, various animals were flown into outer space to identify potential detrimental effects of high in takeoff and landing, microgravity, and radiation exposure at high altitudes.

The Space Race reached its peak with the Apollo program that captured the imagination of much of the world's population.. From 1961 to 1964, NASA's budget was increased almost 500 percent, and the lunar landing program eventually involved some 34,000 NASA employees and 375,000 employees of industrial and university contractors. The Soviet Union proceeded tentatively with its own lunar landing program which it did not publicly acknowledge, partly due to internal debate over its necessity and the untimely death (in January 1966) of Sergey Korolev, chief engineer of the Soviet space program.

The landing of Apollo 11 was watched by over 500 million people around the world and is widely recognized as one of the defining moments of the 20th century. Since then, public attention has largely moved to other areas.

The last major leap of in the USSR–USA Space Race was the Skylab and Salyut programme programs, which established the first space stations for the U.S. and USSR in Earth orbit following termination of both countries' moon programs.

At the conclusion of the Apollo program, crewed flights from the United States were rare, then ended while the shuttle program was getting ready to kick into gear, and the space race had been over since the Apollo–Soyuz test project of 1975, started a period of U.S.–Soviet co-operation. The Soviet Union continued using the Soyuz spacecraft.

The shuttle program restored spaceflight to the U.S. following the Skylab program, but the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986 marked a significant decline in crewed Space Shuttle launches. Following the disaster, NASA grounded all Shuttles for safety concerns until 1988. During the 1990s funding for space-related programs fell sharply as the remaining structures of the now-dissolved Soviet Union disintegrated and NASA no longer had any direct competition, engaging rather in more substantial cooperation like the Shuttle–Mir program and its follow-up the International Space Station.

In the 1970s the Soviet Union started to invite other countries to fly their people into space through its Intercosmos program and the United States started to include women and people of colour in its astronaut program.

First exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union was formalized in the 1962 Dryden–Blagonravov agreement, calling for cooperation on the exchange of data from weather satellites, a study of the Earth's magnetic field, and joint tracking of the NASA Project Echo. In 1963 President Kennedy could even interest premier Khrushchev in a joint crewed Moon landing, but after the assassination of Kennedy in November 1963 and Khrushchev's removal from office in October 1964, the competition between the two nations' crewed space programs heated up, and talk of cooperation became less common, due to tense relations and military implications. Only later the United States and the Soviet Union slowly started to exchange more information and engage in joint programs, particularly in the light of the development of safety standards since 1970, producing the co-developed APAS-75 and later docking standards. Most notably this signaled the ending of the first era of the space age, the Space Race, through the Apollo–Soyuz which became the basis for the Shuttle–Mir program and eventually the International Space Station programme.

Such international cooperation, and international spaceflight organization was furthermore fueled by increasingly more countries achieving spaceflight capabilies and together with a by the 1980s established private spaceflight sector, both being embodied by the European Space Agency. This allowed the formation of an international and commercial post–Space-Race spaceflight economy and period, with by the 1990s a public perception of space exploration and space-related technologies as being increasingly commonplace.

This increasingly cooperative diversification persisted until competition started to rise in this diversified conditions, from the 2010s and particularly by the early 2020s.

Several countries now have space programs; from related technology ventures to full-fledged space programs with launch facilities. There are many scientific and commercial satellites in use today, with thousands of satellites in orbit, and several countries have plans to send humans into space. Some of the countries joining this new race are France, India, China, Israel and the United Kingdom, all of which have employed surveillance satellites. There are several other countries with less extensive space programs, including Brazil, Germany, Ukraine, and Spain.

As for the United States space program, NASA permanently grounded all U.S. Space Shuttles in 2011. NASA has since relied on Russia and SpaceX to take American astronauts to and from the International Space Station. NASA is currently constructing a deep-space crew capsule named the Orion. NASA's goal with this new space capsule is to carry humans to Mars. The Orion spacecraft is due to be completed in the early 2020s. NASA is hoping that this mission will "usher in a new era of space exploration."

Another major factor affecting the current Space Age is the privatization of space flight. A significant private spaceflight company is SpaceX which became the proprietor of one of world's most capable operational launch vehicle when they launched their current largest rocket, the Falcon Heavy in 2018. Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX, has put forward the goal of establishing a colony of one million people on Mars by 2050 and the company is developing its SpaceX Starship launch vehicle to facilitate this. Since the Demo-2 mission for NASA in 2020 in which SpaceX launched astronauts for the first time to the International Space Station, the company has maintained an orbital human spaceflight capability. Blue Origin, a private company founded by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is developing rockets for use in space tourism, commercial satellite launches, and eventual missions to the Moon and beyond. Richard Branson company Virgin Galactic is concentrating on launch vehicles for space tourism. A spinoff company, Virgin Orbit, air-launches small satellites with their LauncherOne rocket. Another small-satellite launcher, Rocket Lab, has developed the Electron rocket and the Photon satellite bus for sending spacecraft further into the Solar System, the company also plans to introduce the larger Neutron launch vehicle in 2025.

Elon Musk has the stated that the main reason he founded SpaceX is to make humanity a multiplanetary species, and cites reasons for doing it including: To ensure the long-term continuation of our species and protecting the "light of consciousness". He also said,

You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be greatand that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about. It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.

The Space Age marked a major comeback and return with the launch of NASA's Space Launch system during the Artemis I mission on November 16, 2022; it marked the first time a human rated spacecraft had been to the Moon in nearly 50 years, as well as the return of United States capability to get astronauts to the Moon with the Space Launch System and Orion. Additional goals for the 2020s include completion of the Lunar Gateway, mankind's first space station around the Moon, and the first crewed moon landing since the Apollo era with Artemis III.

The U.S. Military has also joined the new space age with the creation of the new Space Force on December 20th 2019.

• Automotive design: Forward Look, 1957–1961
• Googie architecture
• Space Age fashions by André Courrèges, Pierre Cardin, Paco Rabanne, Rudi Gernreich, Emanuel Ungaro, Jean-Marie Armand, Michèle Rosier, and Diana Dew
• Furniture design of the 1950s and '60s by Eero Saarinen, Arne Jacobsen, Eero Aarnio, and Verner Panton
• Amusement park attractions, such as TWA Moonliner and
• Cold War playground equipment

• Space age pop
• Space music
• Space rock
• Space-themed music

• SEDS
• Information Age
• Jet Age
• Atomic Age

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