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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.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. There are five ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


December 29, 2022 Quick space links

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

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

4 comments

  • George C

    If you have data centers near those mega-gateways then you might want to buy bandwidth on the local dark fiber the article mentions and then on the Starlink to replicate data between your centers spread out over the US, and to Europe.

  • Sippin_bourbon

    I was a little miffed that NASA paperwork held up RL. The monthly launch streak was broken. But then, this is a government operation.

  • Jay

    George C.,
    There are already Starlink centers right next to server farms and data centers here in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve done many commissionings at these data centers and what attracts them here is the cheap hydro power. Grant County Washington is where Grand Coulee Dam is, the weather is mild, low tectonic activity, and it is a little over an hour away from an airport. Lots of data centers- search engines, bit-coin miners, and online sellers. Grant County PUD laid fiber to the whole county and everyone has a 1 Gig connection for $35.
    The same deal over at The Dalles in Oregon, most of the data centers are near the Army Corp of Engineers Dam or over where there use to be an aluminum plant. Not only is there the dam at The Dalles, but that is the place where a lot of the generation from the other dams up the Columbia and Snake Rivers flow to the transmission lines, plus there is the DC intertie that starts there and goes down to southern California.

  • Col Beausabre

    Another one bites the dust
    “Vladimir Putin’s proclaimed “rocket man” became the fourth top Russian official to die under mysterious circumstances in the past seven days, RadarOnline.com has learned.

    Vladimir Nesterov, 74, pioneered the “world’s best” Angara rocket for Russia. He also formerly served as general director of the Khrunichev Center, a state research and production space center created to help Putin facilitate the nation’s first successful manned mission to the moon.”

    I wonder when the nomenklatura will act to remove the Number One menace to their health

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