You know I doubt it will ever happen, but I have often wanted to see Star Trek explore the space race era of its alien races. After all, we went to the Moon for some very specific reasons. We had the cold war, it was a major propaganda victory. But like, what was it that led the Vulcans to launch their first rocket ships? We know from the Enterprise episode that showed a flashback to Suram that they had interstellar capability before his time, so it would have been the emotional Vulcans going into space. What was their motivation for doing so?
Why did the first Klingons launch into orbit? (At least with them, I'm guessing it's because Kahless pointed to that star in the sky and promised he would return there, and the development of missile technology is a pretty good precursor to developing spacecraft technology.) But still, what were the first Klingon astronauts like? The Klingon scientists working at their version of NASA?
What motivated the first Ferengi to launch into orbit, and how did they even manage massive technological undertakings involving combustion on their soggy, rain-soaked world?
How did the Pakleds ever manage to get off the surface of their planet with even a hang glider, much less a rocket ship, to even begin setting their Samaritan snares?
What about planets that have been established to have no moons? Their space program would need to have a much more ambitious goal and much higher infrastructure to ever leave their planet's orbit in the first place. Even we are using the moon as a stepping stone to hopefully one day get to another planet in our system - imagine that you didn't have that, and had to go straight from orbiting your own planet to trying to reach an entire other planet in the system.
Each of these stories would be so very different from the space program history that we know, and also a chance to explore the proto-culture of these alien races from far before any of the eras that we are familiar with.
