From Marina Bejamin's Rocket Dreams.
Images of our lush fragile globe beamed back from afar made cooing, protective converts of the most forward thinking rationalists, and before long many of these had swaddled themselves in Gaia and environmentalism.
Exploration was out and conservation was in. Worse still (at least for those of my generation who had imbibed Space Age dreams along with our mothers' milk), space itself was internalized, its dark brooking depths becoming little more than a poetic analogue for the uncharted continents of the human mind. Within less then a decade of landing on the Moon, all our outward-bound aspirations had more or less turned in on themselves.
To heap irony upon irony, the principal people we have to thank for this unexpected legacy are none other than the astronauts.