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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.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four 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.

 

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Arthur Clarke in 1964 predicts the future in 2000

An evening pause: Something to ponder over the weekend. The video only includes two short clips from this 1964 BBC show, and thus picks two that have ended up to be largely right. And though Clarke’s predictions were not all right, he hit the mark an incredibly high number of times.

Hat tip John Jossy.

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

5 comments

  • wayne

    Dr. Brian Keating
    Co-Director: Arthur C. Clarke Center for the Human Imagination, UC San Diego
    Host: “Into the Impossible Podcast”
    https://www.youtube.com/@DrBrianKeating/videos

  • wayne

    The wonder-world of 1960….

    “To New Horizons” (1940)
    The Futurama Exhibit at GM’s Highways & Horizons Pavilion
    The New York World’s Fair 1939-1940
    https://youtu.be/aIu6DTbYnog
    (23:00)

    “A World with a future in which all of us are tremendously interested, because that is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives.”

  • Jeff Wright

    Postrell’s book “The Future and its enemies” should be required reading…along with “METAMAN,”
    Seizing the Future
    “Higher Superstition–the academic left and it’s quarrels with science

  • Ronaldus Magnus

    Clarke and Robert Heinlein are my all time favorites. It is no surprise that Heinlein has a present day fan, one Elon Musk. Reach For The Stars is no longer science fiction.

  • Andrew_W

    Elon Musk is loosely based on Heinlein’s character D. D. Harriman.

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