This is CBS Eye in the World. I'm John Bachelors.

13th anniversary of the launch of Behind the Black. I welcome Bob Zimmerman, the author behind the black.

Bob and I were remembering the launch and how we ate it. We were in beta for 10 years before Bob launched.

This is your opportunity to participate. Your donations, your subscriptions are generous.

We're going to start with Starship. But before that, Bob, congratulations 13 years. I don't know whether you've ever anticipated how many years you want to do this.

But 13 seems a lot. What have you learned in 13 years, Bob, about the website?

You know, you learn how to do things fast and smart and make it clean and pure and make things understandable to your readers.

To me, I always thought that I'd be doing this most of my life because I don't want to retire. I like writing and so I don't keep writing until I can't write anymore.

It, to me, the best thing about the website was that for years you had to pitch stories to magazine editors.

And if one out of 20 got accepted, it would still take about a year before we'd seen print.

With the website, this is such a liberating experience. I see an article, a story that I think is interesting. It's published within 20 minutes.

And if it's a longer essay or some research, I have something like a Mars, something I do on Mars. So it's up in an hour.

And no one stops me and I have to pitch it. And so therefore you get a lot of things. The readers get a lot of stuff that I think is more interesting because of that.

And I get to write it. And that's the thing that's been taught. The report of your listeners over the years has always been spectacular, John.

So I really appreciate any donations that anyone wants to give.

Yes, because they participate. All of our listeners participate in our exploration of the transformation of man space and robotic space over these 13 years.

Everything now turns on the ability to boost weight into space because of reusability and manufacturing and the success of SpaceX and its brethren and sisters.

So we go immediately having stopped on the 13th anniversary to wait for the celebration of the launch of the next Starship 25. What can you tell us Bob about the weight?

Yes, I have a link on behind the black to an update from NASA Space Flight dot com. They cover this stuff pretty well. They've got, you know, live streams going all the time and they record stuff about the work that's going on at both the cheek at the prepare for the next orbital test flight of Starship Super Heavy.

And SpaceX is moving really, really fast. They've already, they're on the verge of completing the launch pad repair and upgrade. This includes putting the giant steel plate in underneath with water system to reduce the violence and eat from the 33 powerful engines on Super Heavy.

That's almost completed. They've done some other upgrades. They've done some other revisions to the Super Heavy number nine. That would be the prototype that was launched. That's the first date and the Starship number 25, which is going to be the Starship on top, the prototype on top.

So they're moving pretty close. So it looks like Elon Musk's prediction that they would be ready technically to launch in August is quite believable. I mean, maybe a week or two delay, maybe instead of early August, late August, they seem that they'll be ready.

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