The worldwide Great Depression was much, much worse than this pandemic, and lasted a decade. It was followed by a period where there was a great deal of creativity invested in how to efficiently kill other people and break stuff. Space travel was a bonus of that. After WWII, people outside the USA invested most of their energies into the boring activity of picking up bricks and mortaring them back together, and in America they moved to the suburbs in massive cars with tailfins to eat TV dinners and watch professional wrestling. The Beats were a tiny number of people who weren't fully appreciated until the 1970s. The vast majority people at the time considered them, and abstract expressionism for that matter, a joke.