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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.

 

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Real Engineering – The World’s Oldest Construction Project: Sagrada Familia

An evening pause: For a full visual tour, watch the video here.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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

6 comments

  • judd

    This video explains how this came to be and who conceived it.

    The link Bob provided at the top is an attempt to convey the spiritual and emotional experience of being there.

    This much longer video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XN0VDdtz6Eg ) shows much more detailed views of the facade statuary with identification and explanation of the reason for the drastically different styles, the different colors of the windows, and includes a tour up the inside of one of the towers.

    i am continually amazed at what a human mind can conceive and what human hands can build.

  • Jerry Greenwood

    I toured the site in 2001 and the advancements since then are tremendous. It was a pure construction site then where visitors had to step around sacks of cement and duck under scaffolding.

  • Jeff Wright

    I imagine the upkeep of road networks is older.

    I view HLLVs similarly…spires of their own kind.

  • David M. Cook

    The Eifle tower was started just a few years later, and was finished by the turn of the century!

  • Cotour

    Related: Engineering in the micro not the macro:

    The INSANE Precision of The National Institute of Standards and Technology:

    Interesting; https://youtu.be/uCyU97MoHFM?si=9gJr8T8COwdIYhWd 14 min.

    In the micro and nanometers NIST has got it locked down, in the macro and buildings, not so much.

  • Cotour

    While we are on the subject of engineering let’s take a look at welding, a very close look:

    Mind Blowing Welding in Super Slow Motion: https://youtu.be/ygLbldJF_dc?si=kDVEEopRYZHsdYyD 9 min.

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