January 28, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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
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


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.
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.
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.