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My February birthday fund-raising campaign for this website, Behind the Black, is now over. Despite a relatively weak initial three weeks, the last week was spectacular, making this campaign the second best ever.

 

Thanks to every person who donated or subscribed. It continues to astonish me that people who can read my work for free like it enough to donate money voluntarily. Words cannot express my appreciation for that support, especially in these uncertain times.

 

If you have been a regular reader and a fan of my work and have not yet donated or subscribed, please consider doing so. I take no ads, I keep the website clean from pop-ups and annoying demands (most of the time). Thus, I depend entirely on my readers to support me. Though this means I am sacrificing some income, it also means that I remain entirely independent from outside pressure. By depending solely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, no one can threaten me with censorship. You don't like what I write, you can simply go elsewhere.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. 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.
 

3. A Paypal Donation:

4. A Paypal subscription:


5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
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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 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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