The Space Age or the New Age of Exploration from the middle of the 20th century to the 22nd century, is an informal and loosely defined historical period marking the time period in which extensive interplanetary and interstellar exploration and development emerged as a powerful factor in human culture and the beginning of post-scarcity economics. It also marks the rise of the period of widespread adoption in the United States of colonialism and late capitalism. Many planets, systems, and peoples became known to humanity during this period. This era was further marked by multiple conflicts for supremacy over Space between the Superpowers.
The term "Space Age" originated during the mid-20th century Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States, however the term fell out of common usage by the turn of the millennium. A surge of new efforts to explore and develop of Space in the 2020s saw some increased usage of the term. After the end of World War III, the US Government's effort to increase the size of its space forces and its colonial ventures across the solar system saw the term return to common usage.
The Space Age also featured colonial expansion—and its accompanying ideologies—by the United States of America and Mexico during the late 21st and early 22nd centuries. The period is distinguished by an unprecedented pursuit of off-Earth territorial acquisitions. For much of the first half of this era, colonialism dominated by the United States, thanks to a post-war military hegemony in space.
Overview[]
The United States began systematically developing Cislunar Space from 2018 driven partly by the patronage of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. Under Musk's direction as CEO of SpaceX, a new, fully reusable spacecraft was developed, the Phoenix, which could fly further and faster by being refueled in Earth Orbit, and most importantly could be flown hundreds of times without need for extensive maintenance. In 2021 Lunar Energy Ltd. reached the Moon using this vehicle. In 2023 NASA funded the first human mission to Mars. To prevent conflict over space resources, the Outer Space Treaty was amended in 2025, formally granting private businesses rights to claim resources and administer lands beyond Earth, but maintaining the ban on territorial claims by nation-states.
Background[]
Early human exploration (1958-2011)[]
A prelude to the Space Age was a series of American and Soviet (Russian) missions to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the Moon during the middle of the 20th Century. The threat of nuclear war between the two powers led to an arms race that focused primarily on creating more accurate and comprehensive means of surveillance, communications and weapons delivery, which both powers saw as culminating in space. The Space Race that emerged from this arms race, saw both powers make important first steps toward practical space travel, and culminated in the American landings at the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969 by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
By the start of the 1970s however, digital communications had advanced sufficiently to enable reliable unmanned surveillance and communications via satellites positioned in LEO, and US and Soviet space programs were retasked to see to the deployment and maintenance of assets in LEO. This period saw the development of more reliable rockets that were entirely controlled by national governments, and the first reusable spacecraft to service satellites in orbit.
Technology: Ship design and AI[]
Technological advancements that were important to the Space Age were the adoption of autonomous systems and advances in ship design.
Computing was foundational to space exploration, but it was the addition of differential GPS and machine learning tools that allowed spacecraft to achieve an extreme degree of accuracy in their Guidance, navigation and control (GNC) systems. Spacecraft could now reliably execute complex maneuvers with only a few centimeters of discrepancy without any human intervention. This technology was first adopted by SpaceX and early commercial lunar ventures, but would become the standard for spacecraft GNC by the end of the 2020s, enabling reliably autonomous flights to the moon. The proliferation of autonomous systems was a major contributor to the adoption of on-orbit spacecraft servicing, which extended the range and lifetime of spacecraft.
The ships of the Space Age marked a transition from the bespoke, single-use or partially reusable vehicles of early human exploration to mass produced, general purpose spacecraft. Prior to the early 21st century, most crewed ships were typically purpose built, multi-stage chemical rockets, with a small capsule and service module for a crew of at most a dozen astronauts. Rocket motors were typically single-use, used a variety of combustion cycles, and could not be refueled after flight. A rare exception to the capsule architecture were the American and Soviet Space Shuttles. Built in the late 1970s, these vehicles were partially reusable, but required extensive repairs after each flight that led to some labeling them as "re-salvageable" spacecraft.
Over the early 21st century, full-flow staged combustion cycle rockets, with a two-stage booster/spacecraft architecture came to dominate spacecraft design. Dubbed: Starships, these spacecraft first emerged in the United States before being copied by Japan, France, Spain, and Turkey. Starships employed an exceedingly simple airframe, and prioritized high turnaround times for a rapid launch cadence.
Cislunar Space (2018-2067)[]
The development of Starships in the 2020s and the emergence of the nano-satellite industry led to a boom in human activity in Cislunar Space. By 2018 the number of annual launches had doubled, and by 2021 the first commercial flight to the Moon had taken place. Payload deliveries to the surface and Lunar orbit surged thanks to the development of new autonomous control systems, cheaper rockets, and low-energy transfers and ballistic captures.
In-Space Services were the driving force behind the rush to Cislunar space. As the Earth had become increasingly dependent on space-based communications and navigation technologies for economic and military activity on Earth, the need to maintain those assets became an important driver for investment from private businesses and major governments. The earliest in-space servicing companies were primarily responsible for satellite refueling, tracking space weather events, and on-orbit data processing or "edge computing."
Near Earth asteroid development[]
Asteroid mining adopted the practice of positioning asteroids into parking orbits in stable gravitational pockets around the Earth and Luna, quarried in the L4 and L5 lagrangian points for mining. Early mining efforts primarily used optical mining to extract valuable volatiles for spacecraft propellant.
By the 2030s, bioleaching became a major component of asteroid resource extraction, as it allowed heavy metals to be separated from regolith with relatively little infrastructure. The development of waterbed mining, a practice in which a portion, or even a whole asteroid would be covered in a liquid filled blanket to protect a mix of many different biomining organisms, created a boom in asteroid exploitation.
By 2050, the US Geological Survey estimated that 10% of all raw materials used on Earth were mined in Cislunar space. In-space manufacturing had become the primary source for new satellites, while resources extracted from near earth objects and Luna enabled nationally controlled supply chains for heavy industry. The GDP of the Lunar and Orbital Economies exceeded 10 Trillion-USD, largely controlled by the US and Japan who had committed the most resources toward capturing asteroids and developing infrastructure in space.
Lunar colonization[]
The 2020s saw the emergence of autonomous low-energy transfers as means of easily sending payloads to the Lunar surface. Earth's moon was seen as the next frontier of the space economy and dozens of companies emerged in the hopes of getting rich from the lunar environment. The first permanent human settlement, Artemis Basecamp, was established in part to support this commercial effort.
Flights to asteroids and the Moon, along with the surge in LEO traffic, ramped up throughout the 2030s and 40s in large part from the US and Japan jockeying for power in cislunar space. As cislunar traffic increased new regulatory regimes emerged. In the United States the Office of Commercial Space Transportation into an independent agency, and awarded the first federal contracts to reduce the presence of debris in orbit.
Japan became the second nation to settle the moon with the construction of Horikoshi Base in the Sea of Moscow. The establishment of Horikoshi Base was a direct result of the development of Japan's H-5 starship, the first superheavy launch system developed outside of the United States. In response, Tranquility City was legally recognized as a company town by the US Congress, placing additional strain on the Outer Space Treaty.
Pre-World War III Map of the Earth-Luna System
While both the US and Japan held relatively equal sway over Cislunar space, the Moon was increasingly seen as being dominated by the United States. American Lunar colonies were home to 70% of the lunar population, controlled 83% of all water-ice reserves, and the Tycho shipyards that birthed the Orbital Command Stations serviced the creation of fleets of ships, both civilian and military. Meanwhile, Japan's bases were predominantly military or research in nature, and were positioned on the Far Side of the Moon. American dominance of the Moon was largely responsible for continued American dominance in Space. The Asteroids were too vulnerable to serve as bases for military operations (though Japan was certainly challenging that with their facilities on the Akiyama asteroid at L3), while the Moon was far more defensible and control of its Helium-3 industry allowed the US to field and fuel its Orbital Command Stations that surrounded the Earth and had been used to blockade Japan's sea and space assets to devastating effect.
Early Settlement of the Solar System (2028-2081)[]
Prior to World War III, resource extraction efforts beyond NEOs was a relatively niche effort. Only a handful of companies, mainly Mars-based, took advantage of asteroids from the Belt or Martian Trojans. Standard protocol was to de-orbit the object from L4, L5, or the Belt, redirect it’s periapsis to Mars, and drop extracted resources there with breaking maneuvers while the object continued along its orbital path out to its new apoapsis. Wherever possible, these objects would be used as asteroid cyclers, mainly to transfer between Mars and the Belt. As their more valuable metals were extracted, whatever remained (usually Silicas, Iron, and Aluminum) would be used to build additional living space on the asteroid or contribute to other on-orbit construction efforts. In 2042, this produced the first O’Neil Ship, used as an Earth-Mars cycler.
Post-war, asteroid mining beyond Mars saw a significant advancement through the introduction of Spore Mining, a process in which a relatively small, autonomous spacecraft would rendezvous with an asteroid or comet and inject it with a cocktail of liquid water and GMOs that would proceed to process regolith, gradually growing a membrane using the silicas and iron of the asteroid, leaving the desirable elements (sometimes specific compounds processed in-situ) behind in the void spaces between the membranes. Eventually the entire object is completely covered in a solid shell. During this process it is de-orbited to Mars.
Spore mining required so little labor and resources, that over the course of the next 30 years, virtually every small asteroid in the belt or near Mars orbit was converted and repositioned either around Ceres or directly in orbit over Mars. Industrial activity over Mars boomed, as new facilities were built to separate, catalog, and make use of the glut of new resources. By the 2060s this actually created a glut in commodities prices that contributed to a system-wide recession, and a majority of the orbital processing centers shut down. This contributed to the earliest form of the Quantum Economic Model, in which the Mars Corporation had to employ an AI management system to keep the processing rate at pace with actual demand.
American colonization of Mars[]
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Colonization of Venus and the Outer planets[]
Main Article: Terran diaspora