You really had to be there to understand, to fully appreciate, quite how astronomically underwhelming man’s first step on the moon actually was. Think the millennium bug but without the sense of doom. Think Mother Teresa’s funeral but without the laughs. Neil Armstrong finally getting out of the silver Portakabin, gingerly setting his big wellies in the dust, like an old woman getting off a train, and saying: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” A line of such wincing, vapid, flabby faux profundity. The overwrought result of a committee of Earth-bound suits looking out of the window overcome by portentousness, it sounds like the blurb for a film poster, or the motto on a charity’s letterhead, or a jingle for a breakfast cereal.

At the time, it didn’t sound like that at all. It sounded like “Smurarshheashsshhhhstepanc-indggganeeeepinde”. Back in the studio, James Burke, a man who at the time was more famous than the astronauts but, like them, seems to have spun out of orbit, had to repeat what they’d said. So what we actually heard was spaceman’s first words from Shepherd’s Bush. We’d waited for this giant leap for hours. The television set had been a grey fizz all night. Nothing happened relentlessly, building expectation to an anaesthetic torpor, until they blew the hatch on the greatest anticlimax of the 20th century (if you don’t count Brigitte Bardot’s film career).

Still, it was the high point of a race that promised us the moon, but provided only reflected light. It doesn’t really surprise me that most American kids believe the moon landing was a covert operation carried out in a hangar in Texas with all the shadows pointing the wrong way. A good conspiracy theory is always so much more entertaining than what actually happened. In fact, everything that happened in the 50 years of the space race was nothing like as exciting as what happened in Star Wars, or The Right Stuff or even The Jetsons. Space never lived up to its billing. I am a child of the space age. Space and nuclear war were the abiding rhythm of my childhood. Rockets were going to get us one way or the other. It all started with Yuri Gagarin, which was exciting, mainly because I was young and he sounded like the Little Prince. Then there was John Glenn, and that, too, was quite exciting. We were living in a grey time of round-pin plugs and Bakelite switches. I listened to the martial music and the static from the thin edge of the atmosphere on a wireless set the size of a pygmy’s coffin that glowed with glass valves – it was technology from silent films.

Science fiction was hitting its golden age, and space was an easy sell. I can remember the exact moment when it all went wrong and crashed back to Earth. It was when the Chinese got in on the space thing. Made in China was a byword for shoddy, for something that fell apart in your hands and gave you an electric shock. Not wishing to be left out and to assert their place as the third way to megalomania, the Red Book merchants catapulted a satellite into the never-never. All it did was send back a little tune, called The East is Red, which sounded prophetically like a ringtone. We could find it on our transistor radios as a satellite passed overhead. It was a silly, crappy little ditty, and I knew that the space race wasn’t about men becoming gods in the wide blue yonder; it was about international brand management and market share on Earth. Space wasn’t the final frontier. It was a bigger billboard.

The soundtrack was very important. The Russians had those great men’s choirs, the mournful sound of superhuman effort and suffering, as if their cosmonauts were pulled into space by workers hauling on ropes. In the West, we had Telstar by the Tornados, the greatest instrumental pop song ever, and Holst, and Fanfare for the Common Man, a piece of wartime workers’ encouragement knocked out by Aaron Copland. But the soundtrack of the big black was nailed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Thus Spake Zarathustra and the floating counterpoint of the Blue Danube waltz.

All great endeavours trail an aesthetic, a look, like a comet’s train. It isn’t conscious or planned. It’s the collective style of popular reaction. The early 1960s grew out of science fiction, flying saucers, cosmological geometry, and was exploited by people who wanted to sell things to children: sweets, cereal, duvet covers. Having taken on the polished chrome fins and neon of 1950s America, it somehow failed to move on. Almost as soon as space travel achieved a look, it dissolved into kitsch – Star Trek’s tight polyester T-shirts and ankle boots. Just as policemen and doctors unconsciously grow to imitate the actors on Z Cars or ER, so the travellers in space became parodies of their cheap children’s programme doppelgängers.

The kitsch of space achieved its cartoon-cliché nadir with Carl Sagan, the polo-necked romantic lead for easy science. Sagan was the Reader’s Digest Einstein, a popular salesman for the space race. Like the men in the cigarette advertisements, he oozed wannabe lifestyle. Then he came up with the time capsule. In retrospect, it’s almost impossible to explain how much serious thought and energy went into this most absurd and hubristic of exercises. The brief was to send an invitation to passing extraterrestrials. It contained all sorts of human bits and pieces. Everyone had an opinion on what should go: Bibles and Korans, photos of old people, aborigines and Balinese dancers, bits of Mozart and the Beatles. It ended up like the montages they play on rolling news channels when they’ve run out of adverts. Someone pointed out that aliens possibly didn’t speak English, so they added universal mathematics, which all Martians were said to understand, and a map of how to get back to Florida.

The largest fuss was made of the images of a man and a woman, etched into indestructible kryptonite. It was the communal compound image of us – unless you were black, of course. The heated argument was about their nakedness. Should Mr and Mrs Earth have genitals and pubic hair? They’re still up there representing us as a depilated Barbie and Ken. And we knew that space was not about up there at all – it was all about down here and our weird, tortured view of ourselves. And not in a good way. Space exploration became a metaphor for the vain, ego-ridden vanity of government and power. It trailed along in its shadow the collateral of spying, nuclear deterrents and Star Wars, and it gave us the GPS, a speaking map in your car; not so much infinity and beyond, more how to get to Leeds avoiding toll roads. When the cold war finished, the point of the space race collapsed. Nobody went back to the moon – there was nothing they wanted or needed on the moon, except poetry and mythology. In a very human way, they just left some junk up there, and a bit of a corporate eulogy signed by Richard Nixon. It wasn’t grand or brave or intrepid; it was ugly and stupid and laughable. The space race wasn’t like Columbus or Magellan or Cook, bringing back something useful or explaining something important. It was pointless and wasteful.

The space race left us with the space station: a zero-gravity gypsy trailer park, a rotting, dangerous caravan rolling around the world being looked after by bored third-rate security guards with physics O-levels and bags full of piss. The experiments that were supposed to be its raison d’être are mostly school projects: can mustard and cress grow in space?

Kaliningrad on the Baltic coast has given space more travellers than any other place on Earth. It boasts dozens of Soviet memorials to the daring adventures of the travellers to a distant darkness. But the statues are chipped, filthy and overgrown. Kaliningrad is one of the most polluted and miserable places in Europe. The space race was a joke at its expense. In Moscow, the museum of cosmology – where you can see Yuri Gagarin’s Sputnik, no bigger than a 1950s cocktail cabinet, and copies of the rockets that sent dogs into space before they’d worked out how to bring them back – is now empty except for snakes of uninterested schoolkids. This is old Communist Russia. Nobody wants anything with CCCP on it. The space race isn’t a symbol of power and bombast. It’s an embarrassment, and that is the great truth about the space programme: it was the future that got overtaken by the present. The rockets, the magnificent noise and power and fury that was meant to symbolise our energy to go on and up, now look like old, wasteful carbon technology. The future isn’t going to be in exploding ever-greater amounts of fossil fuel. The dream that space exploration would find new worlds for man to colonise looks like running away.

All that new science that was promised, which was going to spin off the space race like presents from a Christmas tree, turned out to be Teflon and pens that write upside down. The massive leap forward of the space age was computing – and that had nothing to do with Houston or Cape Canaveral. It was invented in garden sheds in California. The science of propelling large lumps of metal containing two foil-wrapped geography teachers through gravity is as obsolete as the technology of steamrollers. It was never as beautiful or inspiring as astrophysics. This is where the future of space travel really is. It’s in going without moving. The unnecessary bit of the space programme turned out to be the animal, vegetable and mineral components. It’s the maths that’s going places. The final frontier is not out there beyond the Milky Way. The planet we need to get to is our own. The excitement is on Earth. The heroes children want to be aren’t spacemen. They want to save dolphins and live with penguins.

The one lasting aesthetically beautiful thing that did come from the whole guzzling, ugly space business was that photograph of the blue planet: astonishing and moving and vulnerable, our great group photo. And ironically, that image did more than anything to galvanise the nascent ecology movement. We needed to get out of the world to look back and see what was important and where the fight for the future really lay.

When the extraterrestrials get round to opening the junky metal box we sent them, what they’ll find on the inside is probably not Carl Sagan’s sexless couple, but a dead dog.