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Thank you!

 

The July fund-raising campaign is now over. Though the donations and subscriptions were poor for most of the month, the response in the last helped make up the difference. Thank you all for coming through in the end. It was beyond gratifying to find out that there are supporters to my work out there.

 

I will keep this thank you notice up for the next week, just so that everyone who donated or subscribed can see it. And if you haven’t donated this year as yet, please consider supporting me in some small manner. My website has no advertising and no sponsors (other than my readers), and it is free for all to read and comment without charge or registration. Your support is the only thing that keeps me going. You can either give 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. 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.


SpaceX completes two launches

11:41 am

Falcon 9 lifts off with four astronauts on 1st launch
Falcon 9 lifts off with four astronauts on 1st launch

SpaceX today successfully completed two Falcon 9 launches this morning from opposite coasts, with a third launch of a Falcon Heavy scheduled for this evening.

First, the company launched four astronauts (two Americans, one Canadian, and one Russian) to ISS on board its Grace crew Dragon capsule, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Grace is scheduled to dock with the station at 7 pm (Eastern) today.

This is Grace‘s second manned mission. The first stage (B1101) completed its third flight (230 days after its previous mission), landing back at SpaceX’s landing zone at Cape Canaveral.

Less than three hours later SpaceX launched its 18th Transporter mission, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Transporter launches support multiple small payloads or satellites.

There are 130 payloads on this flight, including cubesats, microsats, hosted payloads, and two spacecraft with reentry vehicles and four orbital transfer vehicles carrying 41 of those payloads to be deployed at a later time.

A full list of payloads can be found here.

The first stage (B1082) completed its 25th flight (36 days after its previous mission), landing back at SpaceX’s landing zone at Vandenberg. The two fairings completed their 15th and 11th flights respectively.

The leader board for the 2026 launch race:

113 SpaceX
60 China
16 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
12 Russia

SpaceX once again leads the entire world combined in successful launches for 2026, 113 to 112. It also has a third launch scheduled for 11:53 pm (Eastern) tonight, its Falcon Heavy rocket carrying a National Reconnaissance Office payload and lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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

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