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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.

 

2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
 

3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:

 

4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
 
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

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.


Renaissance – Mother Russia

An evening pause: Performed live 1977.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

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

  • Laurie

    There’s so much spin that I no longer know east from west.

  • Jack

    it is tribute to Solzhenitsyn with lyrics taken from one his novels.

  • Laurie

    Excellent, thanks for pointing that out.

  • Kirk

    Nice!

    As a teenager (not quite four decades ago) I spent a summer working at a marina in the Bahamas. While cleaning a sailboat returned from charter I found an unlabeled mix tape in the player, and it included this song. I played it for several people but wasn’t able to identify it until years later when I was in the Navy serving on a ship out of Charleston and I played it for the nearly blind, albino, Johnny Winter-looking owner of a used record store in North Charleston. He immediately recognized it, walked out to the bins, laid his hand directly on the album’s spine, and then had to pull out a magnifying glass and stare through it for several seconds to verify he had pulled the correct LP (which he nearly always did on the first try)! I’ve still got that record in my box of vinyl in my storage unit.

    The album, “Turn of the Cards”, is full of goodness, particularly “Black Flame” which starts side 2. Thanks Wayne and Bob!

  • wayne

    Kirk–
    That, is a great story!

    Jack–
    thanks for pointing that out.

    There is a b&w video version from a year earlier, wherein Annie does i.d. Solzhenitsyn at the intro, but I went with the color bbc version
    https://youtu.be/VL_CzBFKtWA
    (10:01)

    This tune was confined almost exclusively to FM radio, although a 3-4 minute edited cut was released for AM.

Readers: the rules for commenting!

 

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