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Long ago a teacher told me science fiction was always a story of the future and that was all there was to it. When I read more of it I found stories where aliens landed in the distant past, and then there are time travel stories that start in the future and go to the past and sometimes come back etc.
Assuming, for a moment, that the movie Apollo 13 was not about a real mission but a fictitious one would it have been science fiction and why (not)? Clearly it took place in the past and with now outdated technology but it was about space travel so surely it counts. What about a similar story but set in Antarctica? Just about all the space travel motifs get replicated in that environment (isolation, hostile atmosphere etc).
So when I search for a better term to describe 'hard science fiction' I prefer 'technology fiction', where the story is made possibly by technology that we are unfamiliar with. But I'm assuming the technology is credible. The other end of the genre, the space opera, makes little attempt to make the technology credible and is more interesting it creating an exciting yarn (a worthy aim, but a different one).
While I completely agree about the social commentary I don't know where to put it in my scheme of things.
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