Slovakia traces its roots to the 9th century state of Great Moravia. The Slovaks then became part of the Hungarian Kingdom, where they remained for the next 1,000 years. After the formation of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1867, language and education policies favoring the use of Hungarian (known as "Magyarization") led to a public backlash that boosted Slovak nationalism and strengthened Slovak cultural ties with the closely related Czechs, who fell administratively under the Austrian half of the empire. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved at the end of World War I, the Slovaks joined the Czechs to form Czechoslovakia. During the interwar period, Slovak nationalist leaders pushed for autonomy within Czechoslovakia, and in 1939, in the wake of Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland, the newly established Slovak Republic became a German client state for the remainder of World War II.

After World War II, Czechoslovakia was reconstituted and came under communist rule within Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe. In 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded and ended the efforts of Czechoslovakia's leaders to liberalize communist rule and create "socialism with a human face," ushering in a period of repression known as "normalization." The peaceful Velvet Revolution swept the Communist Party from power at the end of 1989 and inaugurated a return to democratic rule and a market economy. On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia underwent a nonviolent "velvet divorce" into its two national components, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. Slovakia joined both NATO and the EU in 2004 and the euro zone in 2009.

No national government agency; the Slovak Space Office is responsible for inter-ministerial political coordination and multilateral international cooperation; it serves as the official national contact point for international cooperation between space agencies, offices, associations, businesses, and research entities, and is part of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research, and Sport (2023)

Focused on the development of satellites, satellite subcomponents, and other space-related technologies; as a member state of the EU, it is actively involved in all key components of the EU space program, and Slovak researchers actively participate in a variety of EU and/or European Space Agency (ESA) space missions including the Galileo global navigational system program, Copernicus Earth observation satellite program, Rosetta comet probe, BepiColombo (Mercury planetary orbiter), and Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission; has more than 40 established companies actively involved in the space sector (2023)