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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

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Russia’s Proton rocket launches weather satellite

Russia this morning used its Proton rocket to launch a weather satellite from Kazahkstan, successfully completing its first launch in 2023.

The 2023 launch race:

8 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 Russia

American private enterprise still leads China 9 to 5 in the national rankings, and the entire globe combined 9 to 7.

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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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

  • Joe

    I wonder if China will attempt to catch SpaceX and the rest of the US this year? They did alright in 2022 but Musk is planning a lot of flights.

  • pzatchok

    I do not think so.

    China did everything possible last year just to beat Space X by one, and that included several “secret test vehicle” launches of very short lived low orbit satellites.
    And a few were launched with their old solid fuel military rockets. ICBM launchers.

    I just do not think they have the payloads to keep up with last years pace.

  • Ray Van Dune

    I was planning to watch a Starlink launch at 2:32 pm Pacific, and when I went to the link at Next Spaceflight, I saw it had been shifted to 5:32 pm, within the last few hours since I last checked! These last-minute several-hour shifts seem to have been happening a lot lately. Is SpaceX perhaps trying to keep someone off-balance?

  • Ray Van Dune: The launch today was never a Starlink launch. It was a launch putting up satellites for different customers. It was also supposed to launch yesterday but weather forced a scrub to today.

    SpaceX needs to have weather right at both the launchpad and in the ocean where the 1st stage will land. It thus also requires it to be able to shift schedules fast and frequently in order to launch as much as it does. Thus, these frequent late changes are simply its normal way of doing business.

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