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Thank you!

 

The July fund-raising campaign is now over. Though the donations and subscriptions were poor for most of the month, the response in the last helped make up the difference. Thank you all for coming through in the end. It was beyond gratifying to find out that there are supporters to my work out there.

 

I will keep this thank you notice up for the next week, just so that everyone who donated or subscribed can see it. And if you haven’t donated this year as yet, please consider supporting me in some small manner. My website has no advertising and no sponsors (other than my readers), and it is free for all to read and comment without charge or registration. Your support is the only thing that keeps me going. You can either give a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. 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.


ESA selects four European rocket startups for future launches

The winners

The European Space Agency (ESA) today awarded the first launch contracts to four European rocket startups, narrowing the previous selection of five rocket companies in its “Launcher Challenger” program designed to develop a competitive independent rocket industry in Europe.

The winning companies are Rocket Factory Augsburg and Isar Aerospace from Germany, PLD from Spain, and MaiaSpace from France, as shown on the right. A fifth startup, Orbex from Great Britain, had gone bankrupt since it was selected in 2025 as the fifth company in the previous phase of the program.

The contracts conclude the second stage of the Challenge whereby shortlisted companies could submit their proposals before April 2026. The proposals were evaluated by an ESA tender evaluation board focusing on criteria including business case, engineering quality, resources, schedule and compliance.

The European Launcher Challenge first requires the launch service providers achieve an orbital launch before 2028 to demonstrate their capacity to deliver.

Rocket Factory, Isar, and PLD all hope to launch before the end of this year, and either have their rockets at the pad awaiting launch or are in the process of shipping their rockets to their launchpad. MaiaSpace hopes to launch in late 2027.

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

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