To read this post please scroll down.

 

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.

 

So please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. I could really use the support at this time. 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 launches 22 Starlink satellites

SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Cape Canaveral using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

63 SpaceX
40 China
12 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India

In the national rankings, American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65, while SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) only 63 to 65.

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

6 comments

  • Ray Van Dune

    Apparently the Atlas V 551 NROL-107 launch is put off again, until Sunday at 08:47 EST, due to electrical problems in the “pogo” circuit. Pogo is oscillatory feedback caused by fuel flow surging affecting thrust levels, but what circuit controls it God knows. I guess Tory Bruno does.

    I have often heard the launch crew call out “pogo” late in the countdown for Falcon 9s, but never any explanation of it.

  • Ray Van Dune

    Ps. I heard that pogo-ing got the last N-1, causing it to break up just before 1-2 staging, right at the hot-staging latticework as I recall. Heads-up, Elon.

  • Pogo was a problem during the second Saturn 5 launch, causing premature shutdown of engines. They got the capsule into orbit and were able to more or less complete the mission, but the very next flight of the Saturn 5 was Apollo 8, with three men on board going to lunar orbit. They launched in December 1968 because Von Braun’s team in Huntsville was convinced they had found the issue and solved it.

  • Concerned

    Apparently there are electrically controlled bellows in the long main propellant feed lines that actively damp the longitudinal vibrations otherwise called “pogo”. They were so severe in the April 1968 Apollo 6 test launch that it would have seriously injured a crew had one been onboard. Other large rockets in the past have been destroyed because of it.

  • Richard M

    American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 72 to 40. It also now leads the entire world combined, 72 to 65

    I had this post in mind when I ran across one of the most wrong-headed takes in recent memory on Twitter (which is saying something): “My real problem is that space should not be privatized, anything and everything done in space should be done through publicly funded and operated organizations. SpaceX should not be allowed to be independent.”

  • Richard M

    Tory Bruno helpfully explains this a little today on Twitter:

    Louis McCarthy @mccarthy_louis
    What’s the pogo system?

    Tory Bruno @torybruno 8:10 AM · Sep 9, 2023
    Three broad categories of combustion instability in liquid fueled rockets: screech (acoustic resonance inside combustion chamber), buzz (resonance with the medical structure), and pogo (long fluid column resonance in feedlines). Mighty Atlas kills pogo via a fluid energy absorber

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *