ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that science and technology are inextricably part of society and human social enterprise. From the beginnings of science to the industrial revolution, scientific discovery dramatically extended human understanding of the world, and technology our grasp. In the late twentieth century, work in the fields of philosophy of science and technology demonstrate that just as science and technology shape society, the social enterprise also shapes science and technology, from the design and certification of scientific evidence, to the creation and evolution of artifacts and technology. Scholars demonstrate that human values saturate science and technology, an influence made visible by scholarship in fields as diverse as philosophy, sociology, and history of science and technology. The goal of this chapter is to identify and to briefly characterize a range of issues pertaining to space exploration, each providing the scholar with opportunity to explore social and epistemic dimensions of the exploration enterprise.
