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My annual Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind the Black is now over. Though it sagged in the middle, the final week was an amazing barn-burner. My readers responded in an astonishing manner, so that 2024 now looks like it will turn out to be the best year for me financially since I started this webpage in 2010.

 

Thank you to all! I am always at a loss to express my gratitude for this support. No one is required to pay anything to read my work. And yet so many of you are still willing to do so. Thank you again!

 

If you didn't donate or subscribe but like my work, please consider doing so. This support by my readers allows 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.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

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November 1, 2024 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. 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

6 comments

  • James Street

    “P’Nut the Squirrel’s grieving owner says he was treated like a ‘terrorist’ in 5-hour raid by NY state”
    “The state claimed it had to euthanize both animals Friday so that they could be tested for rabies — because the squirrel sunk its teeth into the hand of an official during the disturbing raid.”
    https://nypost.com/2024/11/02/us-news/caretaker-of-peanut-the-squirrelreeling-over-five-hour-raid-of-his-house/

    ***

    “Elon Musk @elonmusk
    President @realDonaldTrump will save the squirrels
    RIP P’Nut”
    8:44 AM · Nov 2, 2024
    https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1852738470017700051

    ***

    “I have information to lead to arrest of Hillary Clinton”
    – P’Nut the Squirrel
    https://t.ly/MvwPn

  • Jeff Wright

    I don’t know that ASAP is “corrupt” just because astronauts don’t want to ride something without an escape tower.

  • Dick Eagleson

    Jeff Wright,

    ASAP didn’t have anything to say about escape towers. Neither Crew Dragon nor Starliner have escape towers. Escape towers, in any case, have always been problematical – they get discarded part way through the booster phase of ascent and so provide no protection for booster issues that develop past the point of discard and no protection at all for any serious issue with a 2nd stage.

    Astronauts have refused to fly on certain spacecraft, but not for reasons related to a lack of escape towers. Doug Hurley, for example, refused to have anything to do with Starliner but was happy to fly the first manned mission of Crew Dragon.

  • wayne

    James-
    Thanks for bringing up the State ordered squirrel-murder.
    I live in Michigan, we have a lot of squirrels. They get killed accidentally.
    What we don’t do here is send out 8-man hit teams, to intentionally kill them.
    What, is going on in NYC?

    Man In The High Castle
    Nazi-American Police
    https://youtu.be/TFM2xZ7dytk
    2:09
    “I can’t even remember what we were fighting for…”

  • wayne

    November 9, 1989
    Jesus Jones
    “Right Here, Right Now”
    https://youtu.be/GYPBt4fZOUI
    (3:17)

    “I was alive and I waited for this.
    Right here, right now.
    There is no other place I want to be,
    Right here, right now.
    Watching the world wake up from history.”

  • Richard M

    Just an aside: Homer Hickam is recovering from cancer surgery, but he’s not letting that slow him down online!

    _____
    Moi in 1993 to NASA: Let’s go back to the moon. Here, I’ve finished a study on how to do it with the goal of building a permanent outpost there like our South Pole Station.
    NASA: No.
    Moi in 1999: Let’s go back to the moon. Here, I’ve written a popular techno-thriller about it that everyone loves. They’ll love you all the more now if you say you’re going.
    NASA: No.
    Moi in 2019: Let’s go back to the moon. Here, VP Pence, is why.
    Pence: OK. By any means necessary by 2024. Oh, and we need to have a person of color and a woman to land, too.
    Moi in 2019: Um, OK, if that’s important.
    Pence: It is.
    Moi in 2019 to NASA: Don’t forget. By any means necessary by 2024.
    NASA: Well, OK. Here’s our plan. We will build an underpowered but very expensive rocket we are afraid even to give a name to but we’ll call the SLS and then, at the same time, build a space station we’ll call Gateway in a lunar halo orbit – never mind how hard it was just to build one in earth orbit – and once it’s built and operational and stuff, SLS will struggle up to it with an old tin can called Orion which will hang around until a giant rocket called Starship can be refueled in space and soar up to get our astros (one poc, one woman, one tbd) and deposit them tail first on the moon, let them get out for awhile, then jump back up to Gateway, get back into the tincan Orion, and scoot back to Earth. What do you think about that?
    Moi in 2024: You didn’t make the deadline.
    NASA: Did you really think we would?
    Moi in 2024: Not after I saw your Rube Goldberg [naughty word] plan!

    https://x.com/realhomerhickam/status/1853501895819854027

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