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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.
 

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NASA’s newly launched Lunar Trailblazer orbiter having power and communications problems

It appears that engineers are having serious problems with NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter, launched on February 26, 2025 on the same Falcon 9 rocket that sent Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander on the way to the Moon.

Following the successful deployment of NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer … mission operators at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California, established communications with the small satellite at 5:13 p.m. PST, as expected. The team subsequently received engineering data, or telemetry, indicating intermittent power system issues. They lost communication with the spacecraft Thursday morning at about 4:30 a.m. PST.

Several hours later, the spacecraft turned on its transmitter, and the team now is working with NASA ground stations to reestablish telemetry and commanding to better assess the power system issues and develop potential solutions.

The spacecraft does not appear to be lost, at least at this moment, but based on this short report, things do not look good. The orbiter’s mission was to globally map the Moon’s potential water deposits.

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

6 comments

  • Just a slight correction. Firefly has Blue Ghost. Intuitive Machines launched Athena. IT seems a lot of the payloads with IM’s lander are having issues.

  • Joe: Hardly a slight correction. Too many landers by too many companies for my poor brain. Now fixed. Thanks.

  • Richard M

    From IM-2’s mission update page:

    3/1/25 | 0815 CT IM-2 Mission Update

    Athena is approximately 152,104 km from the Moon and continues to be in excellent health. Last night, she sent a sequence of photos while using the stars to determine her position in space.

    During transit, flight controllers checked on the Micro Nova Hopper, Grace, and verified she was in good health ahead of a challenging mission into a lunar crater.
    https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2

    ___
    They also did a trajectory correction maneuver last night.

  • Richard M

    So far as I can make out, there is no update so far today on Lunar Trailblazer, and that seems ominous. Looking at the Deep Space Network page, all I see so far is only uplink attempts and no downlink.

    If it ends up as a bust, I think we may be at a point where NASA needs to review and reassess the whole SIMPLEx program.

    As Svetoslav over at NSF put it quite well this morning:

    My issue with SIMPLEx is the high percentage for spacecraft that are dead-on-arrival: don’t transmit at all or go silent very soon after launch. The first satellite Q-PACE never contacted the Earth. The second one LunaH-Map was a Peregrin-like failure – propulsion system failed, never went into orbit, but there was some still some useful data.

    And now the third one appears to be a dead-on-arrival spacecraft.

    .

  • Richard M

    Ack. Failed to close my tag properly. Just in case, let me try that now.

  • Richard M: I fixed the last blockquote tag, but I’m not sure if that was the only problem.

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