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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.

 

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.
 

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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 another 60 Starlink satellites

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched another 60 Starlink satellites, bringing the size of the constellation to 240 satellites.

They also successfully recovered the first stage, which was making its third flight. They also caught one of the two fairing halves in the ship net, recovering the second half out of the ocean.

The leaders in the 2020 launch race:

3 China
2 SpaceX
1 Arianespace (Europe)

The launch replay is embedded below the fold.

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

5 comments

  • MDN

    Did they succeed with the fairing recoveries?

  • MDN: I have updated the post. One fairing captured in the net, the other recovered from the ocean.

  • geoffc

    Third landing for this core, having now launched from all three launch pads.

    So their Starlink missions have mostly used 3rd and 4th flight of boosters. Talk about reducing costs!

    Now if only they would release costs on refurb, and how much cheaper a re-flown booster is vs a new one.

    Interestingly if you look at the Wiki tracking cores, there have not been a lot of new cores added to the fleet in a while. Seems like manufacturing rate of Booster cores is severly reduced or else they are storing a bunch of them somewhere.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/wiki/cores

    Nice problem to have. Too many usable cores to refly…

  • wayne

    Pleasantly surprised to see video of the fairing, and nice to see the barge landing without the signal dropping off at the last second.

    There’s a nice view of the shockwave–>
    https://youtu.be/1KmBDCiL7MU?t=745

  • Dick Eagleson

    Given that F9 1st and 2nd stages are made on mostly the same tooling, the reduction in S1 construction has almost certainly been compensated for by increased S2 construction to support the desired mission cadence. I wouldn’t be surprised if S2 production never slackened last year, even though the overall mission count was down. It would be good to have a stash of new S2’s in the barn going into 2020 to support the planned tripling or more of average launch cadence.

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