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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:

 

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. (Note: if your bank requests you also reference “Diane Zimmerman” in using my email address, do so. We are temporarily using one of her accounts, tied to my email address.)

 

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Behind The Black
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January 28, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

Embedded below the fold.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.

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

3 comments

  • mkent

    A couple of points about Dragonfly:

    1) I don’t think Dragonfly is going to go anywhere near the methane lakes on Titan.

    2) Dragonfly originally had a cost cap of $850 million, not $2 billion. That didn’t include launch, so if you add in the $257 million cost of its launch on a Falcon Heavy, the budget overrun is over 200%, from $1.107 billion to $3.35 billion.

    $3.35 billion is a flagship mission, not a New Frontiers mission. We could have had a Uranus orbiter for what Dragonfly is costing us.

  • mkent

    I should clarify my statement above. While true, even if we hadn’t done Dragonfly, we still wouldn’t have built the Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission in its place. We would have built the Caesar comet nucleus sample return, the Veritas Venus radar mapper, AND the Davinci Venus atmospheric probe. Dragonfly cost us all three of those missions, the first not chosen and the latter two on indefinite hold.

  • Edward

    mkent,
    It is called lost opportunity cost. The cost of the budget overrun was more than just money, it was other science. We lost a lot of science when the Webb Telescope went badly over budget. We are losing more with the Roman telescope overruns.

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