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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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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. 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

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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