To read this post please scroll down.

 

THANK YOU!!

 

My November fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black is now over. As I noted below, up until this month 2025 had been a poor year for donations. This campaign changed that, drastically. November 2025 turned out to be the most successful fund-raising campaign in the fifteen-plus years I have been running this webpage. And it more than doubled the previous best campaign!

 

Words escape me! I thank everyone who donated or subscribed. Your support convinces me I should go on with this work, even if it sometimes seems to me that no one in power ever reads what I write, or even considers my analysis worth considering. Maybe someday this will change.

 

Either way, I will continue because I know I have readers who really want to read what I have to say. Thank you again!

 

This announcement will remain at the top of each post for the next few days, to make sure everyone who donated will see it.

 

The original fund-raising announcement:

  ----------------------------------

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
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

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.


Software issue forces Russia to delay Proton launch until next year

Because of a software issue detected once the rocket was arrived in Baikonur, Russia has been forced to delay one of its last Proton launches from next week until next year, with the new launch date undetermined.

[O]n Dec. 13, 2025, final checks revealed a problem in the Block DM-03 upper stage which forced to postpone the launch, Roskosmos announced. According to the Zakryty Kosmos Telegram channel, a software issue will require the return of the rocket back to the processing building and the disassembly of the payload section. The potential need to ship the onboard avionics back to the manufacturer would likely push the mission well into 2026.

Proton has largely been retired, though it appears it has some undetermined number of military and government launches left on its manifest. In 2023 there were discussions to restart its assembly line, but nothing since has been announced.

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

  • Jeff Wright

    That Proton even launched with an electronics box mounted upside down amazes me. I hope Chelomei’s ghost hounds Putin to the grave.

  • Dick Eagleson

    I wonder more than a little just what sort of “software” requires anything to be physically yanked out of the rocket and returned to the factory in order to be changed? I don’t doubt for an instant that there was some kind of problem discovered with this Proton, but I don’t think it was “software” – unless, perhaps, the avionics were still running on DOS or Windows 3.1.

  • Jeff Wright

    That might be an improvement over what they have with Proton.

    If I am not mistaken, some Russian rockets were hard wired to fly in a certain direction, so the whole bloody pad was put on a locomotive engine type turntable….something the redneck in me admires….after replacing oxygen sensors worth more than my car.

    Elon talked about how some skills are perishable.
    This is why I chafe at cuts. If people are not valued, if programs are not valued—these problems result.

    Economics bore me. Public programs, or private rockets like Percheron in the bad pre-Musk days, suffer when folks aren’t valued.

    They have been trying to kill Proton for so long folks just threw their hands up in a don’t care attitude.

    That is a good rocket—for it to have survived all this abuse.

    Angara is the boondoggle here. It was to be an EELV type rocket with a payload no better than Apollo-era Proton.

    Soyuz-5 is a better option—or would have been if Putin had left things alone.

  • Dick Eagleson

    Jeff Wright,

    I believe it’s just the Soyuz that lacks thrust vector control and needs the launch pad turntable for dial-an-azimuth. But perhaps Proton works similarly.

    Skills are perishable if not exercised regularly. MSFC, for example, has shown no particularly impressive level of skill in a half-century. SLS-Orion launch crews aren’t exactly in a constant state of practice either. If skills are either long-dead or barely acquired in the first place, the decent thing should be done and they should be buried. Cuts aren’t the problem, propping up corpses “Weekend at Bernie’s”-style is the problem.

    I’m sure economics do bore you given your endless enthusiasm for the perpetual wastage of government funds on non-performing “assets” like MSFC. Many public programs don’t deserve to be valued. Percheron and other pre-SpaceX private rocket efforts didn’t die of natural causes, they were done in. And NASA’s fingerprints were all over each crime scene.

Leave a Reply

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