I miss the days when Orwellian science fiction had the decency to be put off into a distant future. Having it as a zeitgeist is eye-rolling. But per Stanley Kubrick, by 2001 we were supposed to have regular service to the moon so maybe there’s no need to put dystopia off very far when you’re soaking in it.
We’d have been much further along in space had folks like Fritz Mondale and Bill Proxmire not helped hamper NASA. I believe it was Gordo Cooper who explicitly blamed Proxmire for stopping the next goal of putting a man on Mars by the 1970s/80s. In a lot of ways, we’re worse off and further away from these goals than we were in the ‘50s (and it’s all become exponentially more expensive).