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My July fund-raising campaign to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black is now over. I want to thank all those who so generously donated or subscribed, especially those who have become regular supporters. I can't do this without your help. I also find it increasingly hard to express how much your support means to me. God bless you all!

 

The donations during this year's campaign were sadly less than previous years, but for this I blame myself. I am tired of begging for money, and so I put up the campaign announcement at the start of the month but had no desire to update it weekly to encourage more donations, as I have done in past years. This lack of begging likely contributed to the drop in donations.

 

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Astroscale releases image of abandoned upper stage taken by its ADRAS-J orbital tug during rendezvous operations

abandoned upper stage, taken by ADRAS-J
Click for original image.

Capitalism in space: The Japanese orbital tug startup Astroscale today released an image its ADRAS-J spacecraft took of an abandoned rocket upper stage during rendezvous operations.

That image is to the right, cropped to post here. ADRAS-J’s mission is to test autonomous rendezvous and close proximity operations as well as obtain images of the stage in order to prepare for a second mission that will grab the abandoned stage with a robot arm and de-orbit it.

Both missions have been funded by Japan’s space agency JAXA. The mission however is unprecedented by that agency, in that it did not design the mission, but instead hired this private startup to do it, signaling that agency’s shift from being the designer, builder, and owner of such projects to becoming simply a customer. If successful, the mission will be the first to capture a very large piece of space junk and remove from orbit.

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

2 comments

  • pzatchok

    Good for them, in fact great for them.

    eventually there will be less and less space junk like this to bring back. New designs and policies will help out.
    If you want our enemies to actually de orbit their junk fast just let some other nation clamp onto it and claim it for their own. They would rather bring it down themselves.

  • Jeff Wright

    You actually don’t see many good images of upper stages like this one.

    Falcon upper stages use a single engine similar to their first stage engines, and can de-orbits themselves rather than hanging around.

    I had hoped that–instead of buying Twitter–Elon would have bought ULA so to have precise hydrolox upper stages so enamored by spooks.

    The worst upper stages are perhaps the old Briz-M.

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