While it's true that apocolyptic stories were a dime a dozen back in those days, it isn't the case that they were whittled out of the canonical bible. They were never part of the canonical bible in the first place, and most of them were gnostic, in any case. Revelations was an extremely late addition -- not fully accepted in the Western church until the 8th or 9th century, IIRC. The Eastern Orthodox bible was codefied well before this, and does not include it.

I'm also not aware of the fundamentalists having an appreciable effect on space exploration. However I suspect that this is simply because it hasn't hit their radar yet. If it does, watch out. Since the election I have been doing a lot of research on fundamentalism -- mostly from academic sources -- in an effort to understand its political impact. Reality has a way of confounding academia, however, so I decided that I needed to get the information first hand. Last sunday I went to a service at a local fundamentalist mega-church, to see what it was all about. I fully expected that my worst fears would be somewhat allayed by experiencing the simple humanity and goodness of these people, however misguided their beliefs. And I did indeed learn that my worst fears and prejudices were quite incorrect: the situation is far more terrifying than I had imagined. Ideological blindess to scientific facts was the very least of their problems; at times the rhetoric coming from the pulpit was just sheer manifest evil. As in, the type of evil that I usually only get to see in videos posted to Jihadi websites, and WWII archival reels.

I would be no more comfortable with these people getting involved in space policy than I would be with Jihadis.