Space technologies and geographic information services

He article is dedicated to the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight into space. The article examines what space technologies have given to humanity. The necessity of development of the direction of preparation of higher education geoinformation service is shown. The geographic information service is based on serviceology, earth sciences and informatics.In the article, the author proves that space exploration is necessary for science - it is a grandiose and powerful tool for studying the Universe, the Earth, and the man himself. The implementation sphere of space exploration is expanding more and more every day. Weather forecast service, navigation, saving people and saving forests, world television, comprehensive communications, ultra-pure medicines and orbit semiconductors, the most advanced technology is already today, and the very near future of space exploration. Moreover, ahead there will be electric power station in space, the removal of harmful industries from the surface of the planet, factories in the near-Earth orbit and the Moon, etc.The result of the development of applied space technologies has become a geoinformation service. The geoinformation service is a complex science obtained as a result of the symbiosis of the Earth and society sciences. Methods and theories, which are taken from the social sciences (interaction of society and individuals, needs and their satisfaction), Earth sciences (spherical shells of the Earth, geodesy, geography, geoecology, mapping), computer science (models, methods, algorithms, languages and software tools for organizing the interaction of programs and software systems, human-machine interfaces, models, methods, algorithms and software tools for machine graphics, visualization, image processing, virtual reality systems, multimedia communication), form the theory of the geoinformation service.