There is no safe way of checking this, and I would hate to find it wasn’t true, but I read somewhere that Lady Thatcher’s favourite pop record is Telstar. She would have been 37 when this rather robotic organ instrumental by the Tornados topped the UK and American charts in the autumn of 1962 – one of the earliest and least likely results of space technology.

Its name and otherworldly ethereal sound were tributes to a communications satellite launched from Cape Canaveral earlier the same year. Like much of the stuff that goes into orbit, Telstar wasn’t much to look at – a metal sphere 34 inches in diameter, covered in solar cells – but its impact was colossal. Only a few hours after its launch, a picture of the chairman of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Frederick Kappel, was relayed via space to television screens in Europe.

Forty-five years later the sky is a perpetually spinning glitterball of communications hardware, making every corner of the planet permanently visible to all the rest. Television coverage of world events is one of the fundamentals of modern life. On the telephone we speak as clearly to Australia as to our next-door neighbour, and, through Google Earth, our home computers can now zoom in from space to pick out our garden sheds. The digital camera was developed originally for observation from space. So was terahertz imaging, which is now adapted to “see through” clothing in airport security checks.

Weather forecasts are no longer a joke – from high above the Earth we can see what’s coming – and we have more to be thankful for than knowing when to pack an umbrella. Farmers, for example, get much better guidance on when to sow and when to harvest, thus reducing waste and improving yields.

On land and sea, global positioning systems (GPS) have deleted the word “lost” from the language of navigation. Airports use them to avoid congestion; emergency services to cut response times; engineers to survey transport routes and steer bulldozers along exact lines and cambers. From their various windows in the sky, technicians clock everything from traffic jams to migrating wildlife. Geologists pinpoint the sites most likely to yield oil, minerals or fresh water. Insurance companies work out which areas are most vulnerable to subsidence or flooding. Archeologists find new evidence of ancient civilisations. Man-made and natural disasters – oil spills, forest fires, atmospheric pollution, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes – can be mapped, tracked and sometimes predicted, and a network of marine buoys transmits data via satellites to give early warning of tsunamis.

Earthly horizons now have the transparency of glass. Armies no longer face invisible enemies, and nations threaten each other through sub-orbital space. Ships illegally dumping oil can be tracked back to port. Stolen vehicles can be traced. Other species, too, have nowhere to hide – fishermen can follow the shoals as easily as farmers watch their crops.

Not all space is external. The technology that took astronauts to the moon has also taken us deeper into our own corporeal selves. When Nasa was gearing up for the Apollo programme in the 1960s, it developed new techniques for enhancing pictures of the moon. This very same technology, in the form of computer-aided tomography (Cat scans) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is now used in hospitals to scan bones and soft tissues, bringing faster, more reliable diagnosis and saving patients from the knife. Laser technology used to study the Earth’s ozone layer has suggested a treatment for atherosclerosis that is much less invasive than heart bypass surgery and more effective than balloon angioplasty. Digital image detectors developed originally to monitor the atmosphere can produce clearer breast scans than conventional mammography, and with a lower radiation dose. Where cancer is suspected, supersensitive silicon chips from the Hubble Space Telescope allow biopsies to be done with a tiny, non-scarring needle instead of a scalpel.

And so it will continue. Life on Mars may become no less remote, but lives on Earth will grow forever longer and healthier. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) used in plant experiments on the space shuttle have been successfully trialled in cancer surgery and wound-healing experiments. Pill transmitters swallowed by astronauts to check their temperature and blood pressure are being tried experimentally to monitor the health of foetuses in the womb. Human chromosomes are being analysed by techniques used originally to

“read” photographs from space probes, allowing early detection of infant abnormalities. Foam insulation material from the space shuttle’s external fuel tank has been adapted to make lighter, stronger moulds for artificial limbs.

Infrared radiation sensors used by Nasa to check the temperature of distant stars and planets have been borrowed for use in hand-held thermometers that can record a patient’s temperature in two seconds.

For those who see vanity in the moon race, the adoption of space technology by the cosmetics industry is God’s gift to irony. Give or take a few degrees of magnification, human skin and the surface of the moon are strangely similar. In both places, says Nasa, “you see craters, boulders, folds, furrows, hills and valleys”. Because of the different light quality on the moon, shadows look very unlike those on Earth – a phenomenon that made early photographs from unmanned satellites difficult to interpret. How high is that boulder? How deep that crater? The image-processing software that translated the shadow patterns into accurate heights and depths is now being used by cosmetics companies to demonstrate the effects of anti-wrinkle cream.

Nasa imaging techniques have also been used to monitor the condition of historic documents such as the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence; reveal earlier paintings beneath old masters, and read faded and previously undecipherable portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The British Library is using a similar system to study the Codex Siniaticus – the oldest known near-complete Bible manuscript in the world.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then opportunism is its first-born son. Some of the applications of Teflon came out of the space programme (it was actually stumbled upon in 1938 by Dr Roy Plunkett at the DuPont laboratories in New Jersey), and many other now-ubiquitous products owe their origins to extraterrestrial problem-solving. The first rechargeable cordless power tools were made by Black & Decker to enable astronauts to drill core samples from the moon. Smoke detectors were developed in the 1970s by Honeywell for the American space station, Skylab. Domestic water filters grew out of the system used to sterilise the Apollo astronauts’ drinking water.

Solar cells, first used to power satellites, now carry much of our hope for an energy-efficient future, and lithium-ion batteries developed for space keep our laptops running. One of the

most effective home insulation materials was copied from the aluminium heat shields fitted to spacecraft. Polarised and scratch-resistant sunglasses came out of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Shopping malls, stadiums, airport terminals and the Millennium Dome have

been roofed with the Teflon-coated glass-fibre fabric created for moon suits. A Nasa polishing process gives added speed to ice skates; and tiny V-shaped grooves called “riblets”, developed to reduce drag on aircraft, now speed racing yachts, rowing shells and swimsuits.

Carbon fibre was actually an earlier British invention (from the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, in the 1960s), but it reached its apogee in space. Carbon-fibre-reinforced graphite, for example, was used in the nose cone of the space shuttle. Combining strength, lightness and heat resistance, it became, like a precious metal, every bit as glamorous as the objects it transformed. Graphite rackets changed tennis from wristy art to gladiatorial combat. Carbon-fibre racing cars turned Formula One from gladiatorial combat into a mind game.

As sport reminds us, space involves a peculiar combination of adventurism and calculated risk management. On the one hand you have Alan Shepard’s 400m golf drive on the moon in 1971; on the other, a pressurised, fire-retardant body suit capable of withstanding micrometeoroids and a temperature range of plus 135 to minus 85 Centigrade. Earthly spin-offs have included the reflective “space blankets” used to retain the body heat of marathon runners and accident victims, flame-resistant fabrics and safer, lighter breathing systems for firefighters. Less obviously, the explosive bolts used to free the space shuttle from its rocket boosters led in the US to a new, more powerful and faster system for releasing people trapped in car wrecks – cutting-tools powered by explosives. Even space waste can save lives. Scrap solid rocket propellant makes a safe, efficient flare that can penetrate the casings of landmines and burn away the explosives inside.

Altogether, Nasa claims there have been “well over” 1,300 spin-offs from space technology. Even piglets in America have benefited. Space technology has helped produce a robotic sow that, unlike the real thing, will never run out of milk or roll over and crush its babies. It is capable of grunting, and comes with a choice of eight or 16 nipples. One giant leap for mankind? Neil Armstrong didn’t know the half of it.