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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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Ispace extends schedule for its 1st two private moon lander missions

Capitalism in space: The Japaneses company Ispace has revised its schedule for its first two private moon lander missions, delaying the second by one year while confirming that it is on target to launch the first before the end of ’22.

That second mission will also include a small rover, now being developed.

The only reason Ispace provided for delaying the second mission was “internal and external conditions.” My guess is that the internal conditions refers to that rover development, while the external conditions means they want more time to find customers to fly on the mission. Ispace won’t likely have trouble finding customers, but this gives them more time for others, mostly universities, to propose and create projects for that mini-rover.

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

2 comments

  • BtB’s Original Mark

    In addition to all these landers, I hope NASA proceeds with some out of the box projects on the moon.

    For example, I read about 3 months ago that NASA has a conceptual framework for lunar Wi-Fi framework. So perhaps they are also thinking of networking landers and other robotic machines as part of the future Artemis moon base.

    I could imagine on the moon large construction & mining robots networked with some kind of Moon AI, and enabled by Moon Wi-fi. I’m sure the American Caterpillar, the Japanese Komatsu, and the Korean Hyundai Construction Equipment companies could rise to that challenge. They should all be included in the Artemis moon project.

    Yes I know – I’m proposing a HAL on the moon – but I promise this one will only promote the good of humanity. Of course, we’ll need a kill switch in case this new improved HAL starts building mass drivers that could lob fragments of asteroidal meteorites that previously bombarded the Moon towards a unsuspecting Earth.

  • Star Bird

    Remember it was JFK who talked about laving Man on the Moon before the decade was out we wanted until the very last Minute(1969)when we did

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