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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.

 

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Weather for Saturday’s SpaceX launch is presently poor

The weather for Saturday’s SpaceX launch presently gives only a 40% chance of launch.

Forecasters from the 45th Weather Squadron have issued a slightly more pessimistic outlook for the next two Crew Dragon launch opportunities Saturday and Sunday.

There’s now a 60 percent probability of weather conditions at the launch site violating one of the criteria for liftoff for launch opportunities at 3:22 p.m. EDT (1922 GMT) Saturday and at 3:00 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) Sunday, according to the weather team.

The worst part is that the weather doesn’t look good for either day.

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

  • LocalFluff

    Florida doesn’t have the best space weather. Boca Chica Beach 1,000 km to the west seems to have much more stable weather.

  • Gary Fisher

    That’s a disappointment, but not nearly so much as a failed launch. What are the next launch opportunities after Sunday?

    LocalFluff Re: Boca Chica, I have no doubt that’s in the future (SpaceX is growing there, and fast) but I suspect NASA wanted this done on their turf, and there is likely a lot more infrastructure in place for manned launches at Canaveral than in Boca Chica. That said, Boca’s got some serious advantages as well.

  • Scott M.

    Now updated to 50/50 go/nogo as of now. Crossing all my fingers and toes!

  • Ray Van Dune

    And of course, the weather at the half-dozen abort landing sites has to be taken into consideration too. As long as we stick to the convenient but risky practice of landing our spacecraft in the water to reduce the need to decelerate them at touchdown, weather is going to be a bigger factor than it need be.

    The Russians didn’t have any conveniently located oceans, so they don’t use water landing, but last-second retro-rockets. Boeing uses airbags, which strikes me as a simple and effective solution. SpaceX of course wanted to use propulsive landing, but applying that to manned vehicles was a bit too far of a step for NASA.

    Bottom line is we on Earth live in a deep gravity well, the deepest in the solar system of any surface we could launch from or land on. It is a penalty we have to find a better solution for than landing in water just because that’s the way we’ve always done it.

  • Ray Van Dune

    Ps. Of course the scrub Wednesday had nothing to do with the need for a water landing… that we know of. But my point was that bad seas at one or more abort sites could cause a scrub even in beautiful weather at Cape Canaveral.

    PPs. I wasn’t real comfortable with the vague response I heard to the question about how many and/or which abort sites would have to be no-go to cause a launch to be scrubbed by themselves. Those kind of informal criteria (if they in fact are…) are invitations to “go for it” risk-taking.

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