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.
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
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.
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
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.