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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. 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. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
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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.


SpaceX moves its corporation home from Delaware to Texas

As had been threatened by Elon Musk, SpaceX has now officially filed to move its incorporation home from Delaware to Texas, taking with it signicant tax dollars.

SpaceX, which was incorporated in the famously corporation-friendly Delaware, filed to relocate its business incorporation with the Texas Secretary of State, Bloomberg reported.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly railed against the Diamond State and a judge’s decision to void his $55 billion Tesla pay package.

Another Musk company, Neuralink, has also shifted its incorpoation from Delaware to Nevada.

None of this involves the movement of any physical facilities. However, Musk is making it very clear once again that if a state government interferes unreasonably with his business operations, he will leave it. He did this by the actual shifting previously large parts of SpaceX operations from California to Texas when California government officials attempted to punish him for remaining open during the Wuhan panic. Now he is doing the same to Delaware because it appears one judge decided he didn’t like Musk’s Tesla’s pay package, even though 80% of the company’s stockholders approved.

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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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

7 comments

  • pzatchok

    And the case is not even over.
    He could dispute the total amount for the next year or so.

  • Milt

    Just for fun — and he can certainly afford it — Elon Musk ought to send a copy of Atlas Shrugged to every elected official in Delaware. The problem is, assuming that their reading ability would carry them through the novel, they probably wouldn’t “get it.”

    Anyway, good on you, Elon, for taking this action. Who else will follow in your footsteps?

  • Elon truly is the personification of John Galt.

  • Jeff Wright

    Galt wasn’t as weird.

  • Edward

    Milt wrote: “Just for fun — and he can certainly afford it — Elon Musk ought to send a copy of Atlas Shrugged to every elected official in Delaware. The problem is, assuming that their reading ability would carry them through the novel, they probably wouldn’t ‘get it.’

    At first, I thought that the book was so well written that no one could fail to get it, but then the very next comment shows that some people didn’t get the basic concept behind John Galt’s industrial revolution.

    Galt had left the country to its fate. Musk is not like that. Musk is more like Dagny Taggart, attempting to keep the country going despite the overbearing tyrannical government’s stupidity and counterproductive edicts. Or Musk is like Hank Rearden, who works toward his own goals despite the government taking as much away from him as it possibly can.

    Galt didn’t mind taking the best and the brightest with him. Musk bought Twitter solely to bring some amount of sanity and productivity back to America, Taggart-like.

    Galt disappeared, leaving everyone else behind. Musk has a mission that he continues to pursue, Rearden-like.

    Notice how difficult it was for Galt to convince Taggart and Rearden to leave it all behind and let the “parasites,” “looters,” and “moochers” (whose love of money* led them to demand the benefits of other people’s labor**) to fall due to the poor leadership that they elected. Rearden himself was perfectly willing to feed money to his mooching family, as he didn’t care about the money, just the challenges that he had to overcome. He was an eager engineer, solving problems no matter how difficult. Musk seems this way, where the goal of getting to Mars outweighs the love of money.
    ______________
    * Francisco is right that money is not the root of all evil. From the Bible, it is the love of money that is the root of all evil. Francisco, however, says “The lovers of money are willing to work for it.”
    https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/library/books/franciscos-money-speech-from-atlas-shrugged/

    I disagree. Like Taggart and Reardon, those who have made a lot of money have done so not for the love of the money but for the love of the process that makes the money. Musk did not start SpaceX to get rich, he started it to explore Mars, as launch costs were the biggest obstacle to space exploration. A private company can build satellites and probes for much less than governments do, but the cost of launches were driven by those same inefficient, wasteful governments. It was no use reducing the cost of the probe when the cost of the launch was still prohibitive. Musk got rich, but not from the love of money. He got rich from the love of solving problems. The money is only a byproduct.

    ** Francisco says, “When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.” Government punishes (taxes) those who are productive and rewards the parasites by giving them much of that mooched loot. The point of the book.

  • wayne

    “Ayn Rand’s most important idea…”
    Michael Malice and Lex Fridman
    Lex Fridman podcast (January 2021)
    https://youtu.be/aGqj7yLIsdw
    3:07

  • 370H55V I/me/mine

    The Delaware judge’s pronouns are “she/her”.

    It figures.

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