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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. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.

A petition to have the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations Outer Space Treaty has been submitted to the White House.

3:53 pm

Now’s here’s a good idea: A petition to have the U.S. withdraw from the United Nations Outer Space Treaty has been submitted to the White House.

Read it. Mark Whittington, who submitted it, is absolutely right. We get out, we can claim territory on the Moon and thus apply U.S. law to that territory. People and companies could thus own land and have an opportunity to make a profit from their property.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

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 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

Leaving Earth cover

There are now only 3 copies left of the now out-of-print hardback of Leaving Earth. The price for an autographed copy of this rare collector's item is now $150 (plus $5 shipping).

 

To get your copy while the getting is good, please send a $155 check (which includes $5 shipping) payable to Robert Zimmerman to
 

Behind The Black, c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652

 

Leaving Earth is also available as an inexpensive ebook!

 

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

In coordinated attacks, Taliban terrorists in Pakistan murdered one man and five women, whose only job was to administer polio vaccines.

9:15 am

Savages: In coordinated attacks, Taliban terrorists in Pakistan murdered one man and five women, whose only job was to administer polio vaccines.

Yesterday, a male polio worker was fatally shot, and today four women were killed within about 20 minutes of each other in three apparently coordinated attacks in poor Karachi neighborhoods, including Gadap, where the July shootings occurred. Another woman was killed in Peshawar. Taliban insurgents have repeatedly threatened campaign workers, but so far no one has claimed responsibility for the current or previous attacks. Pakistani officials and international groups supporting the polio campaign are still trying to piece together what happened, says Bruce Aylward, who heads the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.

“The implications [of the attacks] run way beyond polio,” Aylward says, because targeting health workers will deprive Pakistani children from receiving other basic health services as well. Local leaders and community authorities have “got to assume responsibility and assure that the message gets out that this is not acceptable,” Aylward says.

We can’t have children get healthcare or avoid getting polio, can we? It might offend Allah.

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Facebook’s Instagram has updated its terms and conditions so that it now claims “perpetual” ownership to all photographs posted by users.

8:51 am

Facebook’s Instagram has updated its terms and conditions in order to claim “perpetual” ownership to all photographs posted by users.

“You acknowledge that we may not always identify paid services, sponsored content, or commercial communications as such,” the new terms say. That may let advertisers use teenagers’ photos for marketing, raising privacy and security concerns, Jeffrey Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy, told Bloomberg.

And people wonder why I am not on Facebook.

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NASA has named the impact site where the two GRAIL spacecraft hit the Moon today after American astronaut Sally Ride.

6:01 pm

NASA has named the impact site where the two GRAIL spacecraft hit the Moon today after American astronaut Sally Ride.

Though this is a nice gesture, the entire public relations campaign surrounding the GRAIL impact today has been one of the more overhyped exercises at NASA. The impact is going to provide very little new science, and is necessary because no lunar orbit is stable and the spacecraft will eventually crash into the Moon anyway. Better to do it under controlled circumstances. To make such a big deal about it however is hardly interesting, especially since this has been done repeatedly by practically every lunar orbiter.

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A preliminary copy of the next IPCC report has been leaked.

10:27 am

IPCC figure

A preliminary copy of the next IPCC report has been leaked.

In the coming days there will be much discussion of this document — such as how it appears the IPCC has finally acknowledged the importance of the Sun’s variability to climate change — but for now, I post on the right what is probably its most important admission. This graph from the leaked report shows the rise in global temperatures as predicted by all the different climate models used by the IPCC, compared to actual observed temperatures. As you can see, since the late 1990s there has been no significant increase in global temperature. Moreover, the observed data now sits outside the predicted margin of error for all the models, making every single one of these models completely wrong.

But don’t worry, these facts aren’t important. In fact, any facts that contradict the religion of global warming must be ignored. It is far more important to shut down all industry and live like cavemen, just because we have faith in our belief in global warming.

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NASA used Orbital Sciences’ Taurus 2 rocket for the failed launch of its Glory climate satellite in 2011, even though the agency knew the company had not fixed the problem that caused the loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in 2009.

9:01 am

NASA used Orbital Sciences’ Taurus XL rocket for the failed launch of its Glory climate satellite in 2011, even though the agency knew the company had not fixed the problem that caused the loss of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory in 2009.

The investigators believed there was as much as a 50% chance the faulty component — a fairing separation system for ejecting the protective shroud that covered the satellite during launch — would fail again. Sadly, it did, destroying Glory. More significant for the future, however is this:

Other Orbital vehicles, including the air-launched Pegasus and a new Antares rocket, use a version of the same fairing separation system that is most likely responsible for the combined $700 million loss of two key climate-study satellites. Orbital’s original name for Antares was Taurus II.

So far, NASA has not accepted the Antares shroud-separation configuration for operational flights. Dulles, Va.-based Orbital says it has made a number of changes to its frangible joint fairing separation system in the wake of the Glory launch failure, including modifications to the frangible rail used on Antares. The company is developing that rocket under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to carry cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).

If NASA isn’t satisfied with Orbital’s design changes to this system, it could significantly delay the launch of Cygnus and Antares to ISS.

Update: I had mistakenly referred to the Taurus 2 in the first sentence when the rocket used to launch Glory and OCO was the Taurus XL. This is now corrected.

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China’s Chang’e 2 lunar probe, now out of lunar orbit, did a fly-by of the 3 mile wide asteroid Toutatis as it zipped past the Earth last week, resulting in some spectacular images.

2:17 pm

China’s Chang’e 2 lunar probe, now out of lunar orbit, did a fly-by of the 3 mile wide asteroid Toutatis as it zipped past the Earth last week, resulting in some spectacular images.

Launched on October 1, 2010, Chang’e 2 orbited the Moon for 8 months before being redirected last year to the L2 Lagrange point, roughly a million miles on the side of Earth opposite the Sun. But when it left L2 last April, Western observers suspected the spacecraft was heading deeper interplanetary space. It didn’t take long to realize that Chang’e 2 was bound for Toutatis.

This is an example of a very smart re-use of a space probe.

By the way, the first fly-by of another planet took place fifty years ago this week.

One comment

Climate experts are now calling for an end to the regularly scheduled mega-climate summits.

11:31 am

Good news: Climate experts are now calling for an end to the regularly scheduled mega-climate summits.

That these summits haven’t accomplished anything but allow climate bureaucrats to burn tons of airplane fossil fuel to gather in some of the world’s nicest warm weather cities during the winter — thereby making them all look like hypocrites — is not the reason these experts want to cancel the summits. They want to cancel the summits because the summits aren’t getting them the results they want: strict regulation on the lives of everyone else.

Nowhere does the article address the simple fact that in the past three years, since the release of the climategate emails, the creditability of the entire climate change field has gone to zero. The public doesn’t buy their sales pitch anymore, and thus neither do politicians, which is why no one is willing to make a deal at these summits. No one believes anything these climate experts are saying, especially since they have refused to clean up the corruption within their field.

5 comments

Sequestration and NASA

9:49 am

Here we go again. Yesterday an aerospace organization, Aerospace Industries Association, released a sixteen page report [pdf] claiming that NASA will lose 20,500 jobs and NOAA 2,500 if the federal government goes over the “fiscal cliff” and sequestration happens.

Immediately, a slew of news articles xeroxed this report to pound home this point, noting the job loses for the specific cities of each newspaper and how disaster awaits the country if sequestration is allowed to take place and we go over that blessed “fiscal cliff”:

The trouble is, this is all hogwash and bad journalism.
» Read more

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The satellite that North Korea launched early Wednesday appears to be tumbling out of control, according to unnamed U.S. officials.

9:29 pm

The satellite that North Korea launched early Wednesday appears to be tumbling out of control, according to unnamed U.S. officials.

The Defense Department does have the capability to detect a tumbling satellite, especially if its solar panels are visible, though I must emphasize that the information here is so vague it hardly means anything. Regardless, the real issue here is not that North Korea put a working satellite into orbit, but that it now has the rocket capability to put anything into orbit. For us this is not a good thing: A rogue nation that is trying to build nuclear weapons that is also officially still at war with our ally South Korea now has this capability.

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