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My July fund-raising campaign to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black is now over. I want to thank all those who so generously donated or subscribed, especially those who have become regular supporters. I can't do this without your help. I also find it increasingly hard to express how much your support means to me. God bless you all!

 

The donations during this year's campaign were sadly less than previous years, but for this I blame myself. I am tired of begging for money, and so I put up the campaign announcement at the start of the month but had no desire to update it weekly to encourage more donations, as I have done in past years. This lack of begging likely contributed to the drop in donations.

 

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SpaceX scores first in its suit against the Air Force

A federal judge has denied the motion of the Air Force and ULA to dismiss SpaceX’s suit against their block buy launch contract that excludes competition from any other company.

The judge also required the parties go to mediation to settle their differences. Both rulings give added weight to SpaceX’s main complaint, that the company as well as others should have the right to compete for this Air Force launch work.

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

2 comments

  • DK Williams

    No-bid Federal contract? Wasn’t the current Administration going to stop this practice? Some things never change.

  • Dick Eagleson

    The really interesting things to me about the judge’s ruling were the mandatory mediation among SpaceX, ULA and USAF, plus what amounts to a mandated discovery process into the origins of the block buy deal at issue. I think the judge smells something sufficiently rat-like that she’s going hunting for beady little eyes, whiskers and a tail. Things just got really interesting – in the Chinese sense – for ULA and the procurement apparat within USAF.

    The mandated mediation is also interesting because it won’t start until mid-October. That’s about the same time that a second small shipment of RD-180’s is supposed to arrive on ULA’s loading dock. The first such shipment is due sometime in August. If, as I strongly suspect, both shipments are still in the wind by the start of mediation, the whole tenor of the process will be quite different than would be the case if it started, say, today.

    Lots of twists and turns ahead on this case, folks.

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