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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.


October 11, 2024 Quick space links

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, except for the first, which came from several readers. 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.

  • ISRO has booked all the remaining flights of its GSLV rocket
    To quote the tweet: “Within the next decade, both PSLV & GSLV are going to retire, after which India’s launch demands are to be met by SSLV, LVM3, NGLV & private launchers.” The best plan would be to replace all the government launchers with private ones, but that seems unlikely considering the political strength of India’s bureaucracy.

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

7 comments

  • Richard M

    1. I always thought it was neat that as soon as we discovered Neptune, we also discovered that it had a Moon!

    We are way overdue to pay it a follow-up visit.

    2. Christian Davenport just tweeted out that he is hearing that an FAA license for Starship Flight 5 could be granted tomorrow. Meanwhile, Elon is tweeting that Flight 5 will be flying on Sunday, along with shots of a ginormous American flag flying from Orbital Pad B’s tower. Sounds like the dam is ready to burst.

    https://x.com/wapodavenport/status/1844866815073173579
    https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1844840205486043138

  • Brewingfrog

    The estimable Mr. Berger ought to know why Texas doesn’t slide into the Gulf…

  • Jeff Wright

    To Richard M

    Wasn’t Triton once thought to be larger than Ganymede?

  • Dick Eagleson

    Richard M,

    I congratulate Mr. Davenport on the acuity of his hearing.

    Jeff Wright,

    Triton was thought to be just a bit larger than Ganymede when I was a grade-schooler. Of course Mercury was thought to be tidally locked to the Sun, Venus was thought to have an Earth-tropics surface climate and Jupiter was thought to have 12 moons, Saturn 9 and Pluto none. Science marches on.

    To all,

    Good move on the part of Starlab Space to get Luca Parmitano as one of the astronaut-evaluators of its interior space station mockup. As the Primo Carnera of human spaceflight, Parmitano is, himself, an ergonomic edge case. His insights should prove invaluable.

  • Richard M

    Jeff,

    Yeah, my experience was the same as Dick’s, despite being younger — that’s what I first “learned” about Triton in school, too, when I was memorizing planets and moons. The trouble was due to Gerard Kuiper, who was the first astronomer to attempt to estimate a diameter for Triton. He came up with roughly 3,700km. It wasn’t until Voyager 2’s approach in 1989 that we figured out that it was rather smaller than that (though still a pretty big moon, obviously).

    Still very much worth visiting again, though given how long even a Starship launch would take to get a probe there, I fear we are *all* going to be quite old before that happens, if indeed we live to see it.

  • Question for the Assembled Masses: Precisely what was the anomaly from the Upper Stage Merlin? Early light? Late light? And then what did SpaceX do to fix it? Cheers –

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