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The time has come for my annual short Thanksgiving/Christmas fund drive for Behind The Black. I must do this every year in order to make sure I have earned enough money to pay my bills.

 

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As I noted in July, the support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.

 

In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.

 

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SpaceX in the news!

Rather than have two more consecutive posts about SpaceX, I’ve decided to post these two together in an effort to avoid making this website look like a site totally devoted only to this one company.

The first story makes it clear that SpaceX will almost certainly fly the first unmanned demo missions of its manned capsule later this year. We should also get an idea whether the first manned flight will occur before the end of the year, or slip into 2019, in May.

The second story reveals once again the robust and growing financial value of SpaceX.

Elon Musk-led SpaceX Corp is raising $507 million in a new round of funding, valuing the company at around $26 billion, according to a filing seen by Reuters. New articles of incorporation filed by the company last week and sent to Reuters by private analytics firm Lagniappe Labs showed the addition of 3 million ‘Series I’ shares from a previous version filed in November.

The filing also gave the initial value of the Series I shares as $169, 25 percent higher than a value given in its previous fundraising round late last year.

As Al Jolson once said, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” I expect that SpaceX’s value will only go up in the coming years.

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

14 comments

  • geoffc

    Of interest in the Abort Test, it will be flying on a Block 5 booster. It is not expected that the booster will survive the abort scenario, so that is an expensive test, loosing a Block 5 booster. No doubt it will be the highest flight count booster at the time. But with 10 expected flights before refurb, it is unlikely to get any one booster to 10 by December unless the flight rate is amazingly high, and they just refly the same booster over and over again.

  • Kirk

    geoffc, why do you expect the in-flight abort test to be atop a Block 5 core? The core trackers I follow are predicting that it will use the second flight of a Block 4 core.

  • Kirk

    In other SpaceX news, the ASDS Of Course I Still Love You was towed out of Port Canaveral this afternoon in support of Monday’s launch of TESS. It’s about time they started recovering again! I haven’t seen a rocket land since early February. (This will be the first flight of the last Block 4 core, #1045.)

  • Localfluff

    $26 billion doesn’t look as a high valuation to me. Considering that SLS+Orion costs upwards $40bn, and SpaceX can deliver the same service. There’s a lot of money in the space business and I would value SpaceX to almost all of that, with huge profit margins when they transition from pushing the limits and expanding the market to consolidating total world market dominance in aerospace transportation.

    SpaceX isn’t on the stock market because it is Elon’s personal thing to go to Mars, and going public means having to compromise the mission with profit making. But is there any derivative papers one could buy on SpaceX? Some bet marked to their future financial results? There would surely be some popular demand for such a product.

  • geoffc

    @kirk – I guess I was thinking that unless they hold that core, and leave it sitting around, they shouold be all Block 5 all the time by December.

  • Captain Emeritus

    NASA’s Little Joe II solid fuel boosters qualified the Apollo command module abort procedures without wasting a Saturn V.
    Additionaly, STS-1 flew it’s mission, a stack of components never tested in flight together, with a crew.
    The Fed’s demand, and waste billions, on useless paper “feasibility” studies.

  • Cotour

    What is going on with Musk?

    https://nypost.com/2018/07/19/elon-musks-bizarre-tweets-are-raising-red-flags-on-wall-street/

    One of his accomplishments would be sufficient for a mere mortal, has it all caught up to him and is tearing him apart in time, funding and mental stress terms?

  • wayne

    Cotour–
    Musk is upsetting the apple-cart, therefore the left will destroy him, by any means necessary.

  • wayne

    in other news….

    “Why are thousands of Tesla’s sitting in a field in California?”
    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-19/why-are-thousands-teslas-sitting-field-california-0

  • Cotour

    Is Musks “Instability” a function of his more Trumpian attitude and these stories are just disinformation intended to injure and remove him?

    I found this to be unnecessary: https://www.ocregister.com/2018/07/16/musk-labels-diver-a-pedophile-in-spat-over-thai-cave-rescue/

    What was the point? And its this and other Tweets that seem to be a concern. Social media is a sharp and definitely double edged sword that can bite one in the rear end if used while angry or under the influence of mind adjusting substances or other modifying agents.

    Whats up with Musk? When and why did his common sense depart?

  • wayne

    Not going down *that* road.

    (Musk has always been “eccentric,” this isn’t a recently discovered factoid.)
    Musk can’t tax me, so he can say whatever he wants.
    I worry more about phony journalists who take gobs of Adderall every day (for decades) and claim they are objective.

  • wodun

    How do you guys find these old posts to comment on?

  • wodun: This commenting on old posts stems from an effort by cotour to find appropriate posts of mine to post comments of his own that would be on topic. I once asked him to stay on topic within a thread, and he has respected this request.

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