February 18, 2025 Zimmerman/Space Show podcast
The podcast of my appearance yesterday on The Space Show with David Livingston is now available here.
This was a very entertaining show. Great questions from the listeners, involving many major news topics now impacting the future of America and the world.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID 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. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
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.
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.
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The podcast of my appearance yesterday on The Space Show with David Livingston is now available here.
This was a very entertaining show. Great questions from the listeners, involving many major news topics now impacting the future of America and the world.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID 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. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
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.
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.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed 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.
The host, Dr. David Livingston, said: “… I don’t see how Starship says that they can do this, because how many refueling trips do they have to make to get to the … surface of the Moon?”
In the 1960s, NASA considered two ways to get to the Moon: direct ascent and Earth orbit rendezvous. Direct ascent used a huge rocket to go directly to the Moon and land a rocket the size of an Atlas I.
Earth orbit rendezvous used smaller rockets to put the parts into low Earth orbit (LEO) one at a time to build the moonship, like the way they built ISS. They would send a bunch of fueling missions to the moonship, and then send it all to the Moon to land a rocket the size of an Atlas I.
In the 1960s, sending a bunch of fueling ships did not seem unreasonable, but somehow it seems unreasonable today.
A huge difference between then and now is that back then we used expensive expendable rockets that took a month of launch-pad time to prepare, and today we can use cheap reusable rockets that can launch from the same pad in a few days. Starship may be able to launch from the same pad at a cadence of once a day, or maybe even more frequently.
Starship may not be the most efficient way to land men on the Moon, it probably is not, as it was not designed for lunar landings but for atmospheric landings on Mars and Earth. However, it is the hardware that we seem to have in the next few years, and it seems capable of taking massive hardware and lunar-base modules. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander is probably much better for landing men on the Moon. Neither seems to be optimal, however. We clearly need more work to increase efficiency in lunar operations. Considering how nascent such operations are, right now, this inefficiency is expected.