Scroll down to read this post.

 

My February birthday fund-raising campaign for this website, Behind the Black, is now over. Despite a relatively weak initial three weeks, the last week was spectacular, making this campaign the second best ever.

 

Thanks to every person who donated or subscribed. It continues to astonish me that people who can read my work for free like it enough to donate money voluntarily. Words cannot express my appreciation for that support, especially in these uncertain times.

 

If you have been a regular reader and a fan of my work and have not yet donated or subscribed, please consider doing so. I take no ads, I keep the website clean from pop-ups and annoying demands (most of the time). Thus, I depend entirely on my readers to support me. Though this means I am sacrificing some income, it also means that I remain entirely independent from outside pressure. By depending solely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, no one can threaten me with censorship. You don't like what I write, you can simply go elsewhere.

 

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

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
 

3. A Paypal Donation:

4. A Paypal subscription:


5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652


Wallops launchpad repairs to take a year

According to spaceport officials, it will take a year to repair the damage sustained by the launchpad at Wallops Island from the Antares launch failure last month.

The damage didn’t look that serious in the initial assessments. I wonder if this long repair schedule isn’t a negotiating ploy for funding.

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 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

4 comments

  • David M. Cook

    Can anyone imagine Elon Musk allowing these repairs to take an entire solar year? He’d have the job done in a few weeks and be launching within a month!

  • Competential

    Elon Musk is in a completely different business. He is actually developing rocket engines, not just buying old Soviet stuff which has been sitting in storage since the 1960’s. Antares is not the future.

  • Competential

    I’m really impressed by the extreme retardness of the space industry! The singularly popular idea is to dig up whatever Ioseph Stalin and his communists did half a century ago and repeat that. Elon Musk is a genius with his unique concept of trying to apply some modern technology in the rocket industry. Completely unheard of since Wernher von Braun. Angara was developed in 1992. SLS is a 1980’s project all over again. Soyuz hasn’t changed since Sputnik 1. And the Chinese are flying Stalin’s old rocket and spaceship. I don’t know of any industry which is so underdeveloped and backwards as is the rocket launcher industry. SpaceX seems to be the first in the business to even have an RnD budget in a quarter of a century.

    Just look at this Salyut piece of junk which a fraudster pretends to want to use for space tourism:
    http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/business/manx-registered-space-exploration-firm-to-fight-civil-suit-in-us-1-6958688

  • Tom Billings

    Oh, the cost+ contractor’s club have research budgets, too. It’s just that about 80-90% of those budgets are funded as research contracted through a government agency. This is not *just* greedy exploitation of perpetual government R&D by companies run by their former CFOs. It is also something *taught* to them by a Congress that wants to ensure that spending enhances the power of the right people.

    Thus, when Northrop developed the F-20 Tigershark in only 7 years, using their own money, they learned it never had a chance of getting large contracts. This happened in spite of it being far cheaper than its government financed competitors to build and operate. Similar things happened about once each decade from 1946-1986, when the F-20 died. After that, they seem to have learned what their place was as remoras to Congressional sharks.

    The word for this situation is “monopsony”. Few get taught it any more, even in economics. The DoD and NASA record shows that monopsony has just as many agency costs to society as a whole as does monopoly.

    Similar things happened with good bids for NASA programs that did not fit the ideas of one or more NASA Centers, and their patrons in Congress. One of the bids for the Apollo program had a small re-entry module, a service module, and a cruise module for living in, to be disposed of before re-entry. That did not fit Langley’s idea that all the living space should be in the re-entry module, and was rejected. Today, Apollo capsules are historical relics, while Soyuz spacecraft, with their small re-entry modules, their cruise modules, and their service modules are still operational, and productive, at miniscule cost, compared to the Shuttle, much less Orion.

    Possibly the last example of a US Aerospace Contractor spending their own money, on their own initiative, to develop a piece of equipment, and getting their money back in government contracts, was when Dutch Kindleberger put down the money to build a rocket engine test center outside LA, in 1947. It was operational by 1949. Von Braun was of the opinion that this moved US rocket development ahead by about 5 years, compared to getting the government to fund such a center for testing large rocket engines effectively. He said it saved the US from being utterly behind in rocketry.

Readers: the rules for commenting!

 

No registration is required. I welcome all opinions, even those that strongly criticize my commentary.

 

However, name-calling and obscenities will not be tolerated. First time offenders who are new to the site will be warned. Second time offenders or first time offenders who have been here awhile will be suspended for a week. After that, I will ban you. Period.

 

Note also that first time commenters as well as any comment with more than one link will be placed in moderation for my approval. Be patient, I will get to it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *