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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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Tom Scott – The Aéroplume

An evening pause: This looks like an incredibly fun thing to do. From the youtube page:

The Aéroplume, in France, is a helium blimp sized for one person. €60 gets you half an hour’s flight. I had to try it.

More information about buying a flight here.

Hat tip Jeff Poplin.

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

6 comments

  • t-dub

    I know helium is expensive but they only have to flush and refill the blimps once/year so that’s not bad at all. This looks like fun and I believe the sign said they were in Normandie which I am familiar with since visiting there previously. I just may have to go back! :-)

  • Jeff

    I still want to fly using a bat-winged suit like in Heinlein’s “Menace From Earth”, where you could soar on fan driven updrafts in a lunar dome. Those teenage dreams lead to my 10 year long hang gliding obsession/hobby.

    Imagine this blimp idea in a pressurized lava tube on Mars, albeit much smaller blimps would be needed.

  • Cotour

    Rich boys with expensive toys manifesting their business concept imaginings.

    The foundation of innovation and progress, sometimes.

    Not saying it’s good, not saying it’s bad.

    It just be.

  • Jerry Greenwood

    Having worked in an airship hangar my question for these French entrepreneurs is how did they get rid of the pigeons. That may have been the greatest technical hurdle of the project.

  • t-dub

    @Jerry Greenwood – Knowing the French, those pigeons probably ended up in a fancy restaurant, on someone’s plate, smothered in an opulent sauce . . . ;-)

  • John

    Pfffttttt. No need to go to France and paddle around in some human sized blimp. Give me a lawn chair and 42 weather balloons; hold my beer and watch this.

    “This is TWA 231, level at 16,000 feet,” the pilot is reported to have radioed to air traffic controllers. “We have a man in a chair attached to balloons in our ten-o’clock position, range five miles.”

    https://www.blueridgeoutdoors.com/magazine/september-2008/42-balloons-and-a-lawn-chair/

    Lawnchair Larry.

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