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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Lacking focus

A new National Research Council report released yesterday says that NASA lacks focus nor can it complete the missions it has with the resources available.

There’s also this:

In preparing their report, committee members visited NASA’s 10 field centers around the country, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, which is managed by Caltech. They also ran an online survey that drew nearly 800 responses. What they found was little interest in a manned asteroid mission, either inside or outside the agency, Carnesale said. And in spite of President Obama’s call for a manned mission to Mars in the next 20 to 30 years, there’s more of an international appetite for revisiting the moon, Pace said. [emphasis mine]

One of the reasons no one is interested in the asteroid mission is that no one believes it will happen.

First, everyone knows that Obama doesn’t give a damn about it and only proposed it to score temporary political points. He’d rather spend the money elsewhere.

Second, everyone knows that even if Obama was gung ho about sending humans to an asteroid, the mission won’t survive the end of his administration. Like all other presidential commitments since Kennedy, they die when the next president takes power.

Third, everyone knows that there simply isn’t any money to fund it. Even if the Obama was gung ho and the next five presidents were willing to continue his commitment, the federal government, and the United States, is broke, and will sooner achieve bankruptcy than send humans to another world.

Before you can do grand things, you have to make sure your house is in order. Our house is definitely not in order. Not only are our politicians blind to the serious financial problems being caused by the federal government, the public appears to like it that way.

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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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

  • wodun

    If they make the Moon the next big destination, Constellation is officially back. Obama could have just cancelled Ares without gutting the rest of the program.

  • Patrick Ritchie

    Before you can do grand things, you have to make sure your house is in order

    If it was a true national priority it would get done, the fact it is not is as much an indication of the lack of importance attributed to space than it is a reflection of the economy.

  • Kelly Starks

    >..Constellation is officially back..

    Constellation never left. They just renamed it – droped the doppy and redundant Ares-I, and stall the LEM.

  • Another waste of money on a useless study. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (pun intended) to reach this conclusion in about 15 seconds.

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