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The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

 

For this two-week campaign, I am offering a special deal to encourage donations. Donations of $200 will get a free autographed copy of the new paperback edition of Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8, while donations of $250 will get a free autographed copy of the new hardback edition. If you desire a copy, make sure you provide me your address with your donation.

 

As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

 

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March 29, 2018 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

Embedded below the fold in two parts. The first segment was a detailed discussion of Soviet-style nature of China’s space program, while the second segment delved into dark matter and the uncertainty of science.

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

4 comments

  • Localfluff

    The fact that dark mass is individual to each galaxy, as in this extreme case, actually speaks for dark matter as the explanation. Since it varies from galaxy to galaxy it rather has something to do with that object’s peculiar history in the lumpy world of hot dark matter. And that is just one out of millions studied, so there will be odd balls out there after a few billion years.

    Astronomers have found the most bright things first, only now are they zooming in on dim galaxies. 90 years since Edwin Hubble discovered intergalactic space and the expansion of space (i.e. dark Energy with today’s glossary). Prepare for more and more dim stuff nearby to be discovered.

  • Brendan

    Except that the only proof of dark matter is as a fitting constant. Despite billions being spent, it stubbornly refuses to be found – except among the equations that keep galaxies from spinning apart.

  • Localfluff

    @Brendan, Galactic rotation curves was the way “dunkle Materia” was discovered by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s (who also foresaw neutron stars, also of utmost interest today, a very successful astronomer of the last century). Dark matter is seen on larger scales in galaxy clusters that have collided and thus separated ordinary matter from dark matter. And the large scale structure of galaxy cluster locations. And the missing mass is also somehow revealed in the temperature variations in the microwave background radiation, the image of the entire universe. So it is present in all cosmological scales.

    It is not yet observed, I think, on sub-galaxy scales. But tiny galaxies, especially those streams from colliding dwarf galaxies that are surrounding the Milky Way, might be a step towards mapping dark matter more and more locally. I would think that Gaia’s extreme precision astrometry might be capable of revealing any dark matter interfering with the stars’ movements in our quarter or so of the Milky Way. But the expectation is that dark matter is too diffuse and widespread (“hot”) throughout the galactic halo for any local effects to be observed.

  • Localfluff

    Developments in astronomy in the 20th century was about adding unexpected things not predicted by RT or QM or anyone’s imagination. Like big bang, inflation, intergalactic space, dark matter. And there’s room for more surprises. The more they look the more they find and the telescope evolution is awesome.

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