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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Freon leak on U.S. part of ISS?

A news report today says that an accident in the U.S. portion of ISS caused a freon leak.

The report also said there was a leak of ammonia, and that he crew is not in danger from either leak.

The report is also very vague and sparse with information, and appears to come from the Russians, since it also says that the leaks suggest “systemic problems in the operation of the station’s U.S. segment.”

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

  • Orion314

    ISS ,the spruce goose of LEO, a hundred billion dollar boondoggle.Has anything useful ever come back from this colossal affirmative action disgrace? Other than the fact that long term zero gee is really bad for people, Freon leak? Not surprised,, considering that all they seem to do is PR interviews , float around and goof off. The important thing is that , FINALLY , THE half -women astronauts , at long last , have hair with body , just like the TV commercials. They can also pass the pencil test.Get to leave the bras at home. The only mission for the ISS is to burn money and make affirmative action mission critical.

  • Kirk

    I’m not seeing this discussed on NSF, and they are usually all over anything ISS related.

    That interfax link isn’t working for me, but here is a cached version of the story: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kZT84zY_EH0J:www.interfax.com/newsinf.asp%3Fy%3D2017%26m%3D10%26d%3D25%26id%3D786392+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

  • Edward

    Orion314 asked: “Has anything useful ever come back from this colossal affirmative action disgrace?

    Yes, plenty has. Unfortunately, the cost of putting ISS into space is so large that the price of each experiment conducted so far, amortized over the cost of the station, is in the tens of millions of dollars. The real question is: what will it take to make this expensive monstrosity worth the cost?

    If you already did the math, you already figured out that it will take 10,000 experiments to make the per-experiment cost only $10 million. Does that make it worth the cost?

    President Bill Clinton might say that it is already worth the cost, because it kept rocket technology from falling into hostile hands after the Russians partnered with us. But that partnership only added to the cost of the station, and rockets have fallen into the hands of hostile nations anyway. If it hadn’t been a boondoggle before, it certainly became one at that time.

    Oh, and because Clinton added to the cost of the station, cost-saving decisions were made to reduce the scientific usefulness of the station and reduce the maximum crew. Because a fixed number of man-hours are needed for station operations and maintenance, the result is far less available astronaut time to perform experiments, and so a reduction in the number of experiments performed.

    Although it is useful, it probably will never become cost effective.

    I don’t know what these stupid politicians are thinking, when they willy nilly muck with expensive space hardware and carefully thought out plans. Hopefully the National Space Council will prevent this kind of thoughtless mucking around, and hopefully commercial space will start to use space efficiently and effectively.

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