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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.

 

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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.


South Korean rocket startup Innospace wins launch and marketing contract with German broadcast company

The South Korean rocket startup Innospace announced last week that it has signed a $5.8 million launch with the German broadcast company Media Broadcast Satellites (MBS) to not only launch two MBS satellites in 2026 and 2028 using its Hanbit rocket, but to have MBS market the rocket in Germany.

Under the agreement, INNOSPACE will carry out two HANBIT launch missions to deploy MBS satellites into Low Earth orbit (LEO), with one launch in 2026 and the other planned by 2028. In both launch missions, MBS satellites will serve as the primary payloads, with priority in launch scheduling and orbit determination.

INNOSPACE also signed a separate contract on the same day, officially appointing MBS as its exclusive agent for launch service sales and marketing within Germany, marking the company’s entry into the European space launch market. Following the contract, MBS will exclusively distribute launch services based on the HANBIT series to satellite customers in Germany.

Innospace has not yet launched Hanbit. It had hoped to attempt the first launch in July, but in May it delayed it to the end of 2025 due to issues found in a first stage pump. The launch itself will take place at Brazil’s long abandoned Alcântara spaceport on that nation’s northeast coast.

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

4 comments

  • Dick Eagleson

    A German company will buy launches of LEO comsats on Korean rockets departing from Brazil. NewSpace is getting muy transnational. Plenty of intra-European bi-national deals anent launch vehicles from one European nation launching from sites in second European nations – or the UK. Even a few deals by American rocket builders to launch from UK or European sites. And, of course, American rockets launch foreign payloads from the US all the time and have done so for decades. But this new trifecta links Europe, Asia and South America in what I suspect is a record for transnational – and transcontinental – space endeavor, though perhaps only the first of many more such. Perhaps we will even see quad-national launches in which the payload owner, payload builder, launch service provider and launch site are all in different nations. Extra credit for them being on four different continents too.

  • Edward

    Dick Eagleson,
    You wrote: “But this new trifecta links Europe, Asia and South America in what I suspect is a record for transnational – and transcontinental – space endeavor, though perhaps only the first of many more such.

    It seems that you do not count the Ariane series of rockets as European being launched in South America. American payloads (North America, that is) have gone up in those rockets, which would make this tri-transcontinental.

    Perhaps we will even see quad-national launches in which the payload owner, payload builder, launch service provider and launch site are all in different nations. Extra credit for them being on four different continents too.

    I once built a satellite for an Australian operator, who had contracted with Japan to build the payload, and the Japanese subcontracted to us, in North America, to actually build the satellite and integrate the payload, which was then launched in French Guiana, South America, on a European Ariane 5 vehicle. I count five continents involved in that one.

  • Dick Eagleson

    Edward,

    Fair points all. Kourou is a sort of special case. It is physically in South America, but has legal status as a part of France. And I was counting NewSpace, not OldSpace. Kourou may become NewSpace, at least in part, in coming years, but it’s not there yet.

  • Edward

    Oh. Yeah. That was the point started in your second sentence.

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