Initially, the United States and the Soviet Union invested unprecedented amounts of resources in breaking records and being first to meet milestones in crewed and uncrewed exploration.

This period of competition gave way to cooperation between those nations and emphasis on scientific research and commercial applications of space-based technology.

Also, the German launches, as well as the subsequent sounding rocket tests performed in both the United States and the Soviet Union during the late 1940s and early 1950s, were not considered significant enough to define the start of the space age because they did not reach orbit.

A rocket powerful enough to reach orbit could also be used as an intercontinental ballistic missile, that could deliver a warhead to any location on Earth.

[11] 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.

[12] Other reasons for the continuation of the space age are defending Earth from hazardous objects like asteroids and comets.

The same year President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, commonly known as NASA.

[15] The Space Race reached its peak with the Apollo program that captured the imagination of much of the world's population.

[14] 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.

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 Echo II balloon satellite.

[22] In 1963 President Kennedy could even interest premier Khrushchev in a joint crewed Moon landing,[23][24] 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.

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.

[30][31] Some of the countries joining this new race are France, India, China, Israel and the United Kingdom, all of which have employed surveillance satellites.

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 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.