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Please forgive this pleading appeal. I am now doing my annual February fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black to celebrate my 73rd birthday. Your support, by donating or subscription, will allow me to continue this work as long as I am able. And I don't want to stop anytime soon.

 

And I do provide unique value. Fifteen years ago I said NASA's SLS rocket was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said its Orion capsule was a lie and a bad idea. As early as 1998, long before almost anyone else, I predicted in my first book, Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, that private enterprise and freedom would conquer the solar system, not government. And while everyone else in the media still thinks Mars has no water, I have been reporting the real results from the orbiters now for more than five years, that Mars is in fact a planet largely covered with ice.

 

I could continue with numerous other examples. If you want to know what others will discover a decade hence, read what I write here at Behind the Black. And if you read my most recent book, Conscious Choice, you will find out what is going to happen in space in the next century.

 

Nor am I making this up. My overall track record bears it out.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:

 

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February 3, 2026 Quick space links

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

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

6 comments

  • Richard M

    “It is my understanding that some of these life support functions will be handled by the Dragon capsule that brings up the crew.”

    This is the most obvious aspect in which Haven-1 really is “minimum viable product.” Vast wanted to get a space station into orbit as fast as possible with the resources they had, and shifting a lot of the life support over to a Crew Dragon shaved significant development time off the station. You have to admire that aggressiveness.

    And speaking of “minimum viable product,” I’m not sure you can find better examples than Luna 9. But hey, it worked.

  • Nate P

    There’s another company building hardware to support deep space comms: https://cascade.space/

  • Patrick Underwood

    Must be 300 kilotons, I’m guessing?

    I’m Mr. Pedantic today.

  • Richard M

    Patrick,

    Actually, the answer may be more complex than even the tweet suggests!

    Here is what Astronautix’s entry on the R5-M says:

    The series of 5 launches began on 11 January 1956 with launch of a dummy warhead. The test with a live weapon came on 2 February 1956, with the successful launch of the design for an 80 kT warhead over a 1200 km range – from Kapustin Yar. Area 4N to a point near Priaralsk Karakum, 150 km north-east of the Aral Sea. It was heavily classified that the prototype warhead was a fizzle when it exploded – planned yield was 70 kT, but actual yield was 300 metric tons. The problem was traced to a failed heating element on the warhead. Some sources give the yield of this test as 300 kT, but this seems to stem from a common Soviet disinformation practice. Even in classified documents, nuclear weapon yields were often given incorrectly by a factor of ten or in different units. The idea was that if you were a spy, you would be deceived, but if you were in the know, you’d recognize the error and the reason for it. Therefore a 300 t fizzled yield might be listed in some official documents as 300 kt.

    http://www.astronautix.com/r/r-5m.html

  • Patrick Underwood

    Ha! Thanks for that, Richard M! I give it to Mr. Zimmerman for the win.

  • Jeff Wright

    I think it is well within Congress’ purview to wonder where Lunar Starship is.

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