Spellbreakers Ep. 169: Why America Abandoned Space

The New Glenn rocket just blew up on the launch pad, and host Matt Trump, a physicist who grew up watching every Apollo mission, has been waiting his whole life to give this talk. In this episode, Matt walks through the full arc of American spaceflight from Project Mercury through Apollo 17, Skylab, and the slow cancellation of missions that left astronauts reading the want ads. He traces America's psychological retreat from space through pop culture, from Star Wars arriving in 1977 as nostalgia rather than aspiration, to his surprising reread of Terms of Endearment as the greatest astronaut movie Hollywood never meant to make. He also covers the Challenger and Columbia disasters, the space shuttle era's trade of heroism for routine, and what the Artemis II moon flyby and private space companies mean for where we go next.