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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.

 

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Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.

Engineers at Lockheed Martin are adding structural braces to fix the cracks found in the first Orion capsule.

Engineers have designed a “doubler” to place over the cracks to ensure the craft can sustain loads from pressure, launch and landing. Geyer said two of the structural aids, similar to devices regularly used on airplanes, could be added to the spacecraft. “We’ve come up with a great plan to basically bridge over those cracks to distribute the load so we don’t see any issues on orbit,” Geyer said.

How reassuring.

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

6 comments

  • Craig Beasley

    I can only imagine the sorts of development problems that SpaceX and others have had with their items, but we’ll never know. As a federal program, everything is laid bare, by law.

    What? You think SpaceX gets everything correct 100% of time? Of course they don’t. But they are not compelled to tell you anything about their missteps.

  • Craig Beasley

    Aw, crud, I mistyped. I meant to say:

    “With Orion, as a federal program, everything is laid bare, by law”

  • Pzatchok

    What they are adding, the rest of the world just calls ‘gussets’.

    It just means they cut their design way to close to the structural limits of the material they are working with.

    I bet they cut the material thickness back as far as possible just to save weight. And now that they have to add material to the structure to strengthen it they are losing a portion of that savings.

    Just engineers over engineering something and typically running into problems easily foreseen that they thought they were smart enough to get around.

    But this could be excused as exactly what we want NASA to do. Push the boundaries of everything right up to the breaking point so that private industry has a better idea of what they themselves can do in the real world.
    I just wish their working projects didn’t cost so much and fail so regularly.

  • jwing

    Reminds me of the saying…”You don’t want to ever see how sauseges are made.”

  • Pzatchok

    But I make sausage.

  • wodun

    It would be nice to read Kelly’s opinion on this.

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