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Please forgive this pleading appeal. I am now doing my annual February fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black to celebrate my 73rd birthday. Your support, by donating or subscription, will allow me to continue this work as long as I am able. And I don't want to stop anytime soon.

 

And I do provide unique value. Fifteen years ago I said NASA's SLS rocket was garbage and should be cancelled. Almost a decade ago I said its Orion capsule 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. And 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.

 

Nor am I making this up. My overall track record bears it out.

 

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SpaceX launches 28 more Starlink satellites on 2nd launch today; sets new 1st stage reuse record

SpaceX this evening completed its second launch today, placing 28 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The first stage (B1067) completed its 33rd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. With this flight, B1067 has tied the space shuttle Atlantis for the second most reused launch vehicle on record.

39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
33 Falcon 9 booster B1067
31 Falcon 9 booster B1063
30 Falcon 9 booster B1071
29 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle

Sources here and here.

The 2026 launch race:

22 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)

As it did in both ’24 and ’25, SpaceX in ’26 so far has more launches than the entire rest of the world combined.

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

  • Richard M

    “I think a $5 million launch or a $15 million launch is a bit of a dream. Personally, I think reusability is a dream. How am I going to respond to a dream? My answer to respond to a dream is, first of all, you don’t wake people up.”

    — Richard Bowles, Managing Director of Sales, Arianespace, Singapore Satellite Industry Forum, 2013
    _____

    Booster 1067 is here to wake us up.

  • Nate P

    I am curious what the maxima of booster reuse will be, as the Falcon 9 won’t be flying forever, and SpaceX would like to transition away from it as soon as possible. Forty flights per booster? Fifty? How close is SpaceX to reaching the material limits of an individual rocket? Of its engines? Probably a closely-held company secret.

  • Ronaldus Magnus

    Richard Bowles opened Arianespace’s Asean office in December 1996 and is currently their Regional Director for Asean countries.

    STILL ! ! ! ! That about says it all.

    Amazon has just contracted MORE LEO launches with that ridiculous, reusable SpaceX.

    I believe that the only entity that has not contracted with SpaceX are the Chicoms.

  • Richard M

    Hello Nate,

    Whatever the answer ends up being, I have to think it will be higher for methalox launchers. But that’s why everyone is chasing that now.

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