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Readers! A November fund-raising drive!

 

It is unfortunately time for another November fund-raising campaign to support my work here at Behind the Black. I really dislike doing these, but 2025 is so far turning out to be a very poor year for donations and subscriptions, the worst since 2020. I very much need your support for this webpage to survive.

 

And I think I provide real value. Fifteen years ago I said SLS was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said Orion 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. Very early in the COVID panic and continuing throughout I noted that every policy put forth by the government (masks, social distancing, lockdowns, jab mandates) was wrong, misguided, and did more harm than good. In planetary science, 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.

 

 

This last claim might sound like hubris on my part, but I base it on my overall track record.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. 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.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. Takes about a 10% cut.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription, which takes about a 15% cut:

 

4. Donate by check. I get whatever you donate. Make the check payable to Robert Zimmerman and mail it to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.


March 31, 2025 Quick space links

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

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

  • Don C.

    “On this day in 1997 Pioneer-10’s mission ended, 25 years after launch…”

    Well, almost ended. If the purpose of Pioneer was to teach us to pay attention, then it was revived.

    Data started to be questioned as far back as 1980 on Pioneer’s location. A paper in 1999 (arXiv:gr-qc/9903024 v2 9 Mar 1999 – Turyshev) started a 14-year march to find why Pioneer was always closer to the sun than we thought. Measurements were off by 10^-9 m/s^2.

    The journey spanned another 14 years to ‘solve this problem’. arXiv:1307.0537 13 Jun 2013 (ten Boom).

    Still leaving us to solve the problem of data storage however – if data from 30 years prior was nearly impossible to retrieve, how will we get at original data even 1000 years from now? Need we go back to vellum and ink?

  • Richard M

    Eric Berger today has a pretty remarkable long form interview with Butch Wilmore about what it was like actually flying Starliner. And it turns out, it was a good deal hairier than we knew. To the point where he felt confident right from the start that he wasn’t coming back to Earth on the Starliner. And Suni Williams felt the same way.

    Wilmore added that he felt pretty confident, in the aftermath of docking to the space station, that Starliner probably would not be their ride home. “I was thinking, we might not come home in the spacecraft. We might not.”

    And: Wilmore describes how there was a moment during the docking attempt where he was doubtful that they could either dock with the station, or have sufficient control to get back to Earth, either. Scary stuff.

    https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of-what-flying-starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed/

  • Jeff Wright

    Forget Starliner–I’d rather be in an F-104 as a self-driving car.

    A Pinto at least has a steering wheel.

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