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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:

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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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Blue Origin targeting from 12 to 24 New Glenn launches in 2026

New Glenn prior to its first launch in January 2025
New Glenn on the launchpad prior to its
first launch in January 2025

Following the second successful launch last week of its New Glenn rocket, including a successful recovery of its first stage, Blue Origin’s CEO David Limp says the company’s goal for 2026 will be to attempt between 12 and 24 launches.

Limp said success on New Glenn’s second flight would set the company up for a significant increase in cadence. The company is building enough hardware for “well above” a dozen flights in 2026, with the upper-end limit of 24 launches. The pacing item is second stages. Right now Blue Origin can build one per month, but the production rate is increasing.

A pace of one launch a month would be unprecedented for Blue Origin in numerous ways. Since 2017 the company has built a poor reputation for slow and tentative operations. It took years for it to finally begin building BE-4 engines at a rate that could serve both it and its customer ULA. It took years to get New Glenn off the ground, a half decade later than initially announced. Moving from a lazy tortoise to a enthusiastic hare so quickly would thus seem very unlikely.

Blue Origin however has a major 27-launch contract with Amazon to launch its Amazon LEO constellation (formerly known as “Kuiper”). And Amazon desperately needs those launches to happen soon, as it only has 154 satellites in orbit and needs to get about another 1400 launched by July 2026 to meet its FCC license.

Even so, Limp noted that the next New Glenn launch will be to send its Blue Moon Mark-1 unmanned lunar lander to the Moon, and the best schedule he could offer was a launch sometime in the first quarter of ’26. If so, his prediction for the total launches in 2026 seems overly optimistic, at a minimum.

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

7 comments

  • Richard M

    If so, his prediction for the total launches in 2026 seems overly optimistic, at a minimum.

    Frankly, we should all be impressed if they manage just half a dozen launches in 2026. 12 to 24 is, uh, highly aspirational.

    (Nota bene: SpaceX went from 3 launches in 2013 to 6 launches in 2014.)

  • Dick Eagleson

    Blue has a single pad and a single booster recovery vessel. These may turn out to be bigger obstacles to a high launch cadence than factory production rates. SpaceX has learned to do sub-3-day turnarounds of its Canaveral and Vandy pads, but its KSC pad takes longer and its current pace took several years of incremental improvement to achieve. ULA has never turned around a pad in less than 26 days, which it has done exactly once, two years ago, with SLC-41 – and this is a company with vast orbital launch experience compared to Blue. I think achieving even the low end of Mr. Limp’s aspirations for 2026 launch tempo is going to be a considerable stretch for Blue. It will not surprise me greatly if Blue fails to crack into double digits next year.

  • sippin_bourbon

    Ambitious.

    But I agree, even if they get half as many, it would be good.

  • Ronaldus Magnus

    Perhaps the “”company’s goal for 2026 will be to attempt between 12 and 24 launches”” is a way to message all of the Blue Origin employees to step it up.

  • john hare

    On the prediction thread at NSF i went with 4 for the year. Made that prediction after the successful launch. I think the various hardware thoughts expressed here are far less important than the company culture involved.

    I also said that I hope my helping of crow dwarfs an obese ostrich.

  • Richard M

    I think the various hardware thoughts expressed here are far less important than the company culture involved.

    From everything I’ve been hearing, morale at BO still has not recovered from that big set of layoffs in February.

  • Larry R

    @john hare agreed, I’ll be impressed if Blue can manage 3-4 successful launches next year. Their track record indicates that would represent significant growth for the company. If they land boosters on most of those, all the better.

    I very much want BO to succeed, but have serious doubts about their ability to attain and sustain high-tempo operations anywhere remotely near SpaceX or even RocketLab.

    My gut says BO becomes the new ULA, living on government contracts and having niche capabilities that are rare and expensive.

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