At their early stages, the space programs of the major powers were little more than adjuncts to their ballistic missile programs. Initially they were prestige programs, aimed to advertise nations' ballistic missile prowess to their Cold War opponents as well as their home audiences. As the main benefit, they helped to advance the art of multistage, global-range rocketry. Somewhat marginally they also advanced science - the case of the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts by the embryonic U.S. space program of the late 1950s is a case in point. Only when the art of satellite orbiting was mastered with confidence (as measured by the growing reliability and decreasing failure rate) did space programs mature into what they are today: mainstays of global communication and commerce, indispensable military assets for national reconnaissance and vehicles of planetary exploration.
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