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Readers!

 

The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

 

For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.

 

As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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.
 

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4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
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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.


ESA gives its big space rocket company, ArianeGroup, a big subsidy

On November 19, 2024 I noted that in awarding four new rocket startups development contracts worth a total of 44 million euros, the European Space Agency (ESA) had not given any of that grant money to its biggest and most established rocket company, ArianeGroup, which not only owns and builds the Ariane-6 rocket but also has a subsidiary called MaiaSpace that is developing its own smallsat partly reusable rocket, in direct competition with those four small startups.

The exclusion of ArianeGroup in that announcement suggested to me that ESA had decided ArianeGroup’s smalsat rocket subsidary could manage without any additional aid, since its owner is a well-financed big space contractor.

I was wrong. Today the ESA awarded ArianeGroup a much big pile of cash, totaling 230 million Euros, to further finance the development of a reusable demonstration rocket, dubbed Themis, that also uses ArianeGroup’s Prometheus rocket engine. The Themis hopper project has been under development since 2018 initially under the management of Arianespace, has seen many delays in that time, and is now three years behind schedule.

Because of these delays, ESA pulled it from Arianespace in 2022 and gave full control of the project to the builder, ArianeGroup. This new contract award appears to be cementing this new arrangement, and is in addition to previous awards for this project exceeding 224 million euros.

The award also apparently includes funds for ArianeGroup’s MaiaSpace smallsat rocket startup, though the exact amount has not been specified.

The bottom line is that ESA is still dumping lots of cash to its older big space companies. Despite its clear shift to promoting independent rocket startups instead of a single government-controlled commercial entity (Arianespace), it is still favoring the big space contractors like ArianeGroup it has used for decades under that old Soviet-style system.

It will be interesting to see how this unbalanced system plays out in the coming years. Europe might get a competitive rocket industry of many companies, but then it might not, considering its space agency is putting its thumb on the scale to favor the already-established players.

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

3 comments

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