You take a spaceship to the moon as early as FF4, so yeah, sci-fi has definitely been part of Final Fantasy for a long time.

Personally I don't mind that at all, if anything I think RPGs as a whole still stick to the whole "Swords and sorcery with a medieval aesthetic" thing too much. Of course, FF doesn't have to go as far away from that as they did in, say, FF13 (although its age aesthetic was the least of its problems), but keep elements, definitely. Be that FF4's lunar whale, FF8's esthar and space stuff, etc.