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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.
 

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 military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency

SpaceX early today successfully launched a classified military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

I did not post this in the morning because there was a second SpaceX launch scheduled for the afternoon, and I planned on posting both launches in one post. That launch however was scrubbed and rescheduled for tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 90.

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

  • Jeff Wright

    I watched Ellie in Space yesterday.

    One fallout from IFT-10 was how flummoxed the CFD people were over SuperHeavy’s performance.

    One of the reasons I advocated for an Energiya/Buran type Shuttle-2 was that the orbiter was just one of many payloads.

    Hypersonic test articles, spacecraft simulators with tiles, etc….all these could have been used for flight tests.

    I NEVER trusted CFD for spaceflight. I don’t much trust computer models for climate research or anything else for that matter.

    Starship doesn’t impress me, but SuperHeavy does–it really did show up the experts with its “bumblebees can’t fly but they do” moment.

    Large scale test flights are the only way to go. Marshall said that first.

  • Dick Eagleson

    CFD is always a work in progress. The models inform test campaign designs and the test campaign results feed back into the models. That’s why it’s important to be able to afford to run test campaigns.

    If Marshall said that first, it was the young and vigorous Marshall of the Moon Race era and not the elderly and demented Marshall of today, drooling on its bib and barely able to remember its name, never mind what it said 60 years ago. But then Marshall and its contractors could actually build hardware quickly enough in those days to allow for a decent test campaign and not just a single unmanned flight. If SLS was subjected to the same development flight regime as Saturn V, we wouldn’t be sending anyone Moonward sooner than the mid-2040s.

    But, as Yoda famously said, “There is another.”

  • Dick Eagleson opined: “If SLS was subjected to the same development flight regime as Saturn V, we wouldn’t be sending anyone Moonward sooner than the mid-2040s.”

    Curious about the comparison, as ‘Men from Planet Earth’ set Lunar foot 21 months after the first test flight of the Apollo-Saturn system. SLS is projected to put people in position to maybe land on the Moon 8 years after the first test flight. If SLS was on the Apollo test regime, it seems we’d be there, already.

  • Jeff Wright

    THE SPACE REVIEW a few years ago had an article that lauded SLS because it was made during flat budgets. One big stage—giant de facto RATO units and a D-IV upper stage. That’s simpler than the Saturns—Saturn V anyway.

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