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Bulgaria to sign Artemis Accords

NASA yesterday announced that Bulgaria will sign the Artemis Accords tomorrow, becoming the 32nd nation to join the alliance.

The full list of signatories is as follows: Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Columbia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.

The competing alliance of communist nations, led by China, includes only Russia, Venezuala, Pakistan, Belarus, Azerbaijan, and South Africa. That former deep Soviet block nations like Bulgaria and Romania went with the west rather than China illustrates the international distrust of China and its authoritarian methods.

Regardless, we now see a rough outline of the coming cold war in space.

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

9 comments

  • Matt in AZ

    How very interesting that Kazakhstan hasn’t yet joined the China/Russia alliance.

  • Matt in AZ: Russia did itself no good invading the Ukraine. It has made Kazakhstan far less interested in working with it as a partner.

  • Dick Eagleson

    Kazakhstan is charting an increasingly independent course anent Russia in all sorts of ways. Another of Bob. Z’s. posts a bit more recent than this one notes that Kazakhstan has just struck a deal with SpaceX that will provide Starlink service to its schools. I think the Kazakhs smell the collapse of Russia rapidly approaching and are preparing for a post-Russian future.

    Anent the Artemis Accords, Bulgaria’s accession brings the number of AA adherents – 32 – to exactly 10 more than the total adhering to the godawful Moon Treaty. Seven of the nations on the AA adherent list are also adherents of the Moon Treaty. One of these – Saudi Arabia, somewhat surprisingly – will be officially withdrawn from the Moon Treaty as of early January. One hopes that the remaining nations – Australia, France, India, Mexico, Netherlands and Romania – currently adhering to both will soon do likewise.

  • Questioner

    Mr. Zimmerman: Your use of the word “communist” in the context of your article is empty and meaningless. This increases my doubts as to whether you are capable of producing qualified political statements and analyses.

    If you look at the political processes and the situation in your own country, the US Empire, it is much more likely to be called communist than Russia, the latter is very conservative. Such developments – which you report on almost every day – such as wokism and genderism would not be possible there.

  • Edward

    Questioner,
    You wrote: “If you look at the political processes and the situation in your own country, the US Empire, it is much more likely to be called communist than Russia, the latter is very conservative. Such developments – which you report on almost every day – such as wokism and genderism would not be possible there.

    Interesting that you consider wokism and genderism to be communist or Marxist ideals in America but not elsewhere. Just as it is possible to happen in the U.S., it is shortsighted to think it cannot happen in communism, if the communist rulers choose to do it.

  • Ray Van Dune

    “Such developments – which you report on almost every day – such as wokism and genderism would not be possible there.”

    Of course not – wokism, genderism and other things like racism and uncontrolled “immigration” are things the left nurtures and inflicts on others, as weapons to destroy their societies!

  • Bulgaria should lie after Brazil for the list to be fully alphabetized.

  • Michael McNeil: Thank you. Fixed.

  • Dick Eagleson

    Questioner,

    It is true that only two of the seven nations in the PRC’s lunar base combine are formally socialist/communist – the PRC itself and Venezuela. The others, though, are all one-party autocracies/kleptocracies with Russia, Belarus and Azerbaijan having communist pasts and South Africa being run by a party, the ANC, that has long regarded itself as socialist/communist. Given that the PRC is avowedly socialist/communist and is also footing most of the bills and providing nearly all of the key technology, calling it’s lunar project a communist alliance is at least first and second order correct.

    The project is, in any case, far more communist than the U.S. is an “Empire.” That you trot out this tired old leftist wheeze removes any doubt about your capability of making “qualified” – whatever that means – political statements and analyses. It is impossible to take seriously any “analysis” that starts with a readily demonstrable falsehood.

    The U.S. is not only not an empire, the post-WW2 global order established by the U.S. is the first really novel non-imperial form of international organization ever seen. Under this order, all extant empires were dismantled except the one this global order was stood up to oppose in the first place, namely that of the former Soviet Union. For a straightforward explanation of this I recommend to you the written works of Peter Zeihan as well as any of the numerous long-form podcasts on which he has appeared as a guest and in which he summarizes this thesis. His Joe Rogan appearance is particularly amusing.

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