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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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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.


Planetary Resources today announced a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for its space telescope Arkyd.

Planetary Resources today announced a Kickstarter fund-raising campaign for its space telescope Arkyd.

Forgive me if I am less than enthusiastic about this. Supposedly Planetary Resources had big money backing from a lot of wealthy people, including some Silicon Valley Google billionaires. Why then do they need this campaign? It makes me suspect that the company is an emperor with no clothes.

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

8 comments

  • A million dollars should be chump change for the backers they supposedly have – maybe some backed out since their original announcement. While this Kickstarter campaign seems to be for a single scope to be used by the public, it’s very odd that this would come about well before they have anything more directly financed in orbit.

  • Maybe their backers just have no interest in educational outreach.

    I know that if I was an investor in this company I’d be asking why they’re wasting their time with it.

  • Thankfully I’m not.. so I pledged $100.

  • wodun

    Kickstarter is very trendy these days. It could have more to do with pr than a lack of funds.

  • A bit of both actually. While I’m sure Planetary Resources could have gone door knocking to find 100 folks willing to donate $10,000 to providing space telescope access to classrooms, it wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.

  • Tom Billings

    I vote for describing it as “participatory propaganda”.

    This can be used for good and for bad.

    In WW2, it gave people in the continental US a feeling that they were helping the war effort when they went without sugar, or tires on the car, or meat on one day a week, etc.

    Today it makes people invest emotionally in environmental politics, when they teach their children how to separate their garbage into different containers for newspapers, plastics, yard debris, etc.

    Not least, it could be used as the “thin edge of the wedge” to get respectability for incrementally increasingly costly space projects funded by Kickstarter, by smaller companies, who can grow up to be orbital customers for Planetary Resources.

  • This could also be a form of market research to gauge the level of public interest and get some diverse user experience. It would be interesting to know the cost of building and launching this public access space telescope. I suspect that even without counting development cost, it will cost over a million dollars to deliver on their promises.

  • About $10M I’m told.. and that’s just the marginal cost of this educational outreach telescope.

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