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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

 

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March 24, 2016 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

Today’s podcast of my appearance on the John Batchelor Show is embedded below the fold. Russia, North and South Korea, China, and of course American commercial were on the agenda.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • Wayne

    Great segment!
    For the NERVA program, in brief, they use a mini cylindrical reactor core & then run hydrogen through it to produce thrust.
    As near as I understand it all– they utilize the same methodology as “normal” rocket engines, to power supply turbines, cool the engine chamber, & what-not, so once the reactor heats up enough, it becomes a self-sustaining cycle.
    They use control-rods around the reactor core to control the reactor heat output. (no “giant matches or spark generators” required!)
    Downside is the engine & component’s become highly radioactive & can’t be easily serviced outside of a glove-box.
    (maybe best used for transporting a lot of mass, quickly, ahead of a manned-mission?)
    It’s really ingenious– just hope we don’t have to pay twice for re-doing the research if we ever get back into it. For my rocket-scientist/engineering bud’s; I finally get the whole specific-impulse-second, ‘thang. Up to twice the level of chemical engines.

    (I only play a rocket-scientist on the internet! “It’s all clear to me now, something wonderful is going to happen…”)

  • Matt

    Hi Wayme, this video fits to your comment:

    Nuclear Propulsion In Space 1968 NERVA Manned Mars mission NASA video

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b18HtG0DOCM

  • Wayne

    Matt:
    Thanks– that’s a great video.
    For a short (60 page) text on all the NERVA engines/projects;
    Google: “Nuclear Propulsion for Space LOC card catalog # 79-171030”

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