I don’t think you can really draw a line between the loss of supersonic commercial flight or the stagnation of space travel to environmentalism as the author i

I don’t think you can really draw a line between the loss of supersonic commercial flight or the stagnation of space travel to environmentalism as the author implies here. Supersonic commercial flight was too expensive and commercial flight trended towards lower costs basically as soon as the Concord was built. And you can attribute the lack of progress in space travel to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The US “won” the Cold War and so there was no more reason to throw additional money at something that politicians viewed as a tool to demonstrate western rocket capabilities. Rocket technology = missile technology. If the US can land a rocket on the moon they can most certainly land a missile on Moscow. The real reason is that there was less imperative to innovate.