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Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. I keep the website clean from pop-ups and annoying demands. Instead, 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.

 

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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.


The modern glassmaker

An evening pause: Though the last two minutes are a commercial and can be ignored, the rest of this video shows the modern way glass is produced for our technological society. Most fascinating, especially because the way it is done surprised me.

Hat tip Rocco.

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

3 comments

  • Joe

    Very transparent, unlike Washington!

  • DougSpace

    Is it possible to make glass on the Moon? To become completely Earth-independent, we need to.

  • Tom Billings

    The answer about glass on the Moon depends on where you are and what else you are doing. Oregon L5 Society’s Research Team has used a concept for our Lunar Development Settlement for National Space Society in the virtual world, Second Life, using the basalts of a lava field with a lava tube cave in it, before the end of Phase 1 with in situ resource facilities for producing 3 things:

    1. ) Making Liquid Oxygen from regolith electrolysis, which leaves leaves waste highly enriched in reduced Iron, as well as the native Nickel/Iron bits from meteorites pulled out of the the regolith by magnetic rakes before it is fused.

    2.) Making the LOX process waste yield Iron Pentacarbonyl and Nickel Tetracarbonyl through the Mond Process, and distilling them to separate the 2, as well as separating the Nickel/Iron bits and their PGM residue. This produces a waste product highly enriched in alumina and silica.

    3.) Alumina and silica is most of what you need for high strength “S Glass” fibers from a glass furnace with a spinneret at the bottom and a coating process to keep the glass fibers isolated from water. Calcium from the lunar regolith can be added to lower melting points for separate glass batches. This can be used later with the high melting point fibers, allowing the sort of glass-in-glass composites that Dr. Goldsworthy demonstrated as early as the late 1970s.

    Note is this sort of multiple usage of material collected that will lower capital costs for settlements, which costs, after cheap transportation is available, will be their chief limit.

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