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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.

 

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Russia to install security cameras inside ISS

Roscosmos has decided to install security cameras on its portion of ISS, apparently to prevent the possibility of future sabotage.

The article does not say this outright, but that it specifically mentioned the hole that someone drilled in a Soyuz capsule makes me think so.

The equipment required will be ordered and dispatched to the ISS. The places where the cameras are to be installed will be determined by the space rocket corporation Energia.

At the end of August 2018 there occurred a drop in air pressure on the ISS. It took specialists several days to find out that the hull of the Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft had been drilled from the inside.

This report also suggests that the December spacewalk to inspect the hole from the outside did not help them solve the mystery.

I am skeptical these cameras will prevent future sabotage. First of all, it will be impossible to cover every spot. Second, the sabotage was not on ISS, it was on a Soyuz capsule. Are they also installing cameras there as well, and have simply not made that fact public? Third, what will prevent a saboteur on ISS to block the camera anonymously? I can’t imagine they will be installed in such a way that their locations will be unknown to ISS astronauts.

Unless of course they still suspect an American astronaut did the sabotage, and they plan to specifically deny NASA and its astronauts any information about the camera locations. If so, this partnership is truly beginning to fall apart.

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

4 comments

  • Col Beausabre

    I detect the foul odor of Vladimir Putin in this. Since the “Organs” (from the full Russian expression for the various secret police organizations “The Organs of State Security”) can’t make head not tail of what happened….blame the Americans, who, for their own nefarious reasons, drilled a hole in glorious Soyuz capsule produced by equally glorious Roscosmos under the leadership of the noble Vladimir ! The dastardly Americans – doubtless in the pay of the CIA – will be stymied by the cameras ! All thanks to the wisdom and watchfulness of the Maximum Leader !

    Yes, to us it is a farrago of BS, but it will play well in the Third World and Russia (which is practically the same thing)

  • pzatchok

    But I thought Trump was in the pay of Putin? Or is that the other way around?

    Next election the left will just blame China or NK.

    My real guess is that this is just for internal propaganda.
    They would know who broke out the drill on the ISS. And they would know who went into the capsule.

    I guess no drunk Russian techs admitted to accidentally doing it.

  • Col Beausabre

    We may be drunk, tovarisch, but we’re NOT that drunk.

  • Richard M

    “My real guess is that this is just for internal propaganda.”

    Certainly for consumption for *some* domestic audience.

    Because otherwise, this is just surreal.

    If you can’t trust your own cosmonauts not to sabotage their own ride home, you’ve got a far more serious problem that cameras are not going to fix. And if you can’t trust ISS international partners to provide astronauts who won’t sabotage THEIR only ride home, then the entire ISS project has to be called into grave question, doesn’t it?

    Yet Roscosmos isn’t acting like it’s got those grave kinds of problems. And for some reason, they seem unwilling to pursue the far more likely solution that a deranged/drunk/malicious tech on the ground is responsible. Perhaps because it would mean stepping on toes that cannot be stepped on.

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