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My February birthday fund-raising campaign for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone that so generously donated. You don’t have to give anything to read my work, and yet so many of you donate or subscribe. I can’t express what that support means to me.

 

For those who still wish to support my work, please consider donating or subscribing to Behind the Black, either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. 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’s full IPO, aimed at raising $86 billion

SpaceX logo

SpaceX yesterday filed the full prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its planned initial public offering (IPO) of stock, revealing a plan to sell 555.6K shares at $135 per share, resulting in a total cash acquisition of just over $75 billion. Additionally, the company’s earlier investors will have separate options to buy other shares, raising about $11 billion more, for a total of $86 billion in capital raised.

The stock offering would set SpaceX’s value at about $1.77 trillion, and would make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. This would also be the largest IPO in history. The full prospectus at the link above has a lot of details, which this CNN article distills nicely:

SpaceX plans to sell 555.6 million shares at an initial price of $135 a share, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The decision to dictate one price target, as opposed to offering a range, is a unique move that reflects the hot IPO market around the AI craze and Musk’s own tendency for mega-scale goals.

Musk, who currently owns half of SpaceX, would still control nearly half of the company’s total shares after the offering. However, some of those are special shares with greater voting power, and Musk will control 82.4% of the voting power after the IPO, according to the filing.

The date of this IPO, when stocks will go on sale, is presently set for June 12, 2026. The stock will be traded on Nasdaq, under the label SPCX.

In addition to this $86 billion, SpaceX already earns about $12 billion per year from its more than 10 million Starlink subscribers, and has previously raised more then $12 billion from those initial private investors. All told, the company will have more than $110 billion in cash on hand after this IPO. That is more than four times NASA’s annual budget.

As I have said repeatedly in the past two years, SpaceX is the real American space program. NASA is begin carried along by it.

One detail of interest revealed in some viewgraphs that SpaceX is showing to potential investors is its intention to begin launching commercial payloads on Starship before the end of this year. In other words, expect much more frequent flights in the coming months, moving quickly to orbital tests, placing operational version 3 Starlink satellites in orbit as well as testing refueling in orbit involving two week missions and two Starships.

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

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