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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

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

 

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


Real vs imagined human spaceflight.

Real vs imagined human spaceflight.

He gets it. This was the same problem the Russians discovered when they were operating Mir.

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

5 comments

  • Engineering problems need to be solved by engineers.. and you really need to pay them. I may be wrong, but I don’t think the MarsOne folks are up to that stage yet (and may never be).

    Tune into The Space Show today at 2pm PDT (5pm EDT) to hear Bas Lansdorp give an update.. call in to ask him if he’s crazy :)

  • Sorry I mean tomorrow, Friday, May 10, 2013.

  • D. K. Williams

    No way I’d trust engineers to solve engineering problems in a vacumn (pun intended). You have to include people who will use whatever is to be built, preferably with experience. Where I work, the techniks force “upgrades” upon us and foul everything up, largely because they look down on us end-users as not worthy of their time. The idea of asking us peons whether some new software or hardware is needed would never occur to them. Often a simple phone call would reveal a serious problem before time and money is spent. The dumbest thing I’ve seen was when the geeks bought new room scheduling software and refused help to program it. As a result, a class was literally scheduled in a phone booth.

  • Pzatchok

    Space flight will never be common place until they just hire custodians and janitors for the maintenance tasks on board space stations.

    Seriously, they do not have NASA engineers changing light bulbs and air filters at any NASA facility. When will they just accept that so called normal people can go into space and work a normal job? Or do we want our plumbers to have a six year degree in engineering and hold a jet fight pilot status.

    They have GOT to get over their own self importance.

  • Imagine comes before real. Then experience takes over.

    Experience should guide imagination.

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