A scant 40 years ago the first human was blasted into space on the back of a glorified firework, in the process triggering a headlong rush to get man into orbit.
All of the early effort was driven forward by Cold War politics rather than scientific knowledge. Achieving firsts in the space race that grew up between the US and USSR became the spur, with national pride and the propaganda value of each new record as least as important as the feat delivered by the cosmonauts and astronauts.
In those early, heady days of the 1960s, culminating in the first man on the moon on July 4th, 1969, each flight was an adventure stitched through with exquisite danger.
There was no doubt that this was a hazardous business with possible death always just around the corner.
Tragic evidence of this was provided with the death of Apollo 1 crew, Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee, who died on the ground in a fire which engulfed their space capsule in January 1967. It dented NASA's can-do image when it emerged the same crew hung a lemon inside the capsule to express dissatisfaction with safety. The fizz went out of the script after the moon landings. Both the US and USSR eased back, the propaganda war having been won. Neither considered seriously any plan to colonise the moon.
The mountain had been climbed, and the foothills presented by later orbiting space station projects, such as Skylab and later Mir, failed to stir the public's imagination.
Some of the old pride returned with the arrival of NASA's space shuttle, but the spin had changed. It was presented as a space ferry, a very expensive bus carrying travellers on routine flights into weightlessness where experiments could be conducted.
This wasn't dangerous, or so we thought, until the ill-fated Challenger flight on January 28th, 1986. Seven crew lost their lives 73 seconds into the routine journey, the heartbreaking loss made all the more poignant when it was later learned that safety warnings had again gone unheeded.
The shuttles returned to service two years later and have flown safely since, but have not stirred the taxpaying public. Russia's Mir space station only recently returned to earth after 14 years' service, to be replaced by the new International Space Station, now occupied, orbiting overhead and growing by the month as new components are added.
Much of this space science work is valuable if bland, but the next hurdle has already been set for the couch potato viewers hungry for space adventure.
The US and EU are peppering Mars with satellites, a prelude to a possible US attempt on the Red Planet within the next few years. Such a flight would bring back the old days for a jaded public who only need to watch Star Wars or Deep Space Nine to get a feel for space travel. It would be stunningly dangerous, however, and any failure would be huge.
For this reason, some policymakers now argue that we should hold off on Mars and return to the moon. It lies only three days away, not 12 months, and could even serve as a station on the way to Mars.