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The Device NASA Is Leaving Behind
iminplaya writes "After years of delays, NASA hopes to launch this week a European-built laboratory that will greatly expand the research capability of the international space station. Although some call it a milestone, the launch has focused new attention on the space agency's earlier decision to back out of plans to send up a different, $1.5 billion device — one that many scientists contend would produce far more significant knowledge. "...it would be a true international disgrace if this instrument ends up as a museum piece that never is used.""
Nobel prize winner Steve Weinberg says in the article that it will be the only good science done on the ISS if it goes up!!!
Argh someone new please RTFA and quickly post what THAT item is! The suspense is killing me!
These are 2 devices that require to be in space. The CAM is the centrifuge module. It would allow us to test biologicals systems to long term exposure to low G's. For instance, what would happen with mice over the course of their life time, if exposed to 6/10 G.. This makes all the difference to us as we speak of setting up a colony on mars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I think it's fine as long as it gets done for the people who are still alive.
From the article: "The AMS is an automated device with a specific set of scientific tasks."
Would someone please explain to me why this device must be attached to the space station? (Other than that it was built to be attached to the space station.) It seems to me that such an instrument could've been placed on its own dedicated satellite.
Or is this a case of "we'll get funding for this if we hitch it to the best funding-horse around"?
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
And why does it even need the ISS?
Couldn't it be just launched with a rocket, after adding the necessary bits so that it doesn't need the ISS?
Send both of them. Isn't one of the perks of the ISS that it is build up of modules which can interconnect more or less like LEGO-blocks?
Oh yeah I forget there's this thing called a budget which exists to balance the need for omni-beneficial science with the need for keeping military presence in order to cover ones political ass.
But NASA still has three "cars" remaining, it's not as if both of two "cars" were lost. The first one was lost well before commitment was made.
Why do the rest of us care one iota about dark matter? It may answer fundamental questions etc and could eventually have some positive effect for the people who have to pay for it but surely if our discoveries have to wait 10 years for the next opportunity to put a similar instrument up it's no immediate tragedy?
On the other hand any biological experiments on Columbus might have a far more immediate effect on us e.g. understanding salmonella is important because all of us are at some degree of risk from it.
I am sorry for the people who see their great efforts at risk of being wasted - but not that sorry, because I know that the practitioners of every discipline think that theirs is the most fundamental and important to mankind in some way and all of them are wrong, because everything is important.
This is all just my personal opinion.
Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
Um... no. The Challenger blew up in the 80s. The project was conceived in 1994.
So since that commitment was made, not two but ONE shuttle has been blown up.
You're also ignoring the fact that NASA is flying shuttle missions for far less important reasons. The ISS is a huge, ridiculous waste of resources. This piece is the silver lining on that cloud, the one major scientific venture. They're skipping it in favor of kiddie science projects and more stuff related to human activity, i.e. putting more lives in danger.
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
The Challenger blew up in 1986, whereas the commitment was made in 1994. I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.
If you want to make a more valid point, you could indicate that neither the space shuttle or the ISS are particularly well-suited for the purpose that they were designed to fulfill (and I'd imagine that many of the ISS's woes are stemming from the issues with the fact that the space shuttle is expensive, dangerous, and can't carry very big payloads -- literally the worst of all worlds).
For what it's cost to send the shuttle into orbit umpteen times delivering parts to the ISS, I imagine that we could have designed and built a large rocket that could have delivered most of the payload in one or two trips. We'd already done it twice -- the US had the Saturn vehicles, and Russia more recently had the the Energia platform.
If we had a better platform than the shuttle for sending large parts to the ISS, we might have actually been able to get some legitimate science done on it. The shuttle was *never* an optimal launch vehicle, even before the safety issues came to light.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The reason for this experiment not being launched has nothing to do with the dangers of spaceflight. It's been bumped because of Bush's manned space flight bullshit.
After all, why focus on real science when sending people to Mars is much more exciting to the average Joe, and has no risk of endangering his precious backwater world-view further.
This whole mess can be blamed on our IDIOT president. We had a project in progress, the ISS, and now we have to change our priorities to satisfy W's ego. Yes it's going to waste a ton of money. Yes it's going to piss off all the people that spent years developing the AMS detector. But obviously Bush doesn't care. Can't wait till he's gone.
Worse yet, this is clearly a case of putting politics over science. This 'lab' will accomplish nothing more, it seems, than the same insipid crap that's been done since the beginning of the Shuttle era: materials science in 0-g. Zero gravity can be simulated on earth, fairly well. Doing good astronomy needs to be done in space away from sources of interference.
The remaining shuttle missions need to be used for real science, not some political crap that attempts to smooth over differences between US and Europe. As if a space station would solve political problems. Like they'll say "you guys really screwed up that Iraq thing, but you helped us out with the space shuttle so you're OK in my book."
That's been the problem with the ISS since the very beginning - cute story for political news, bad use of resources for science.
Article states, "Griffin initiated a study last year into alternative ways to deliver the AMS to the station, but they proved to be prohibitively expensive."
Does anyone know if this includes any of the nascent commercial carriers?
If they could get this into a slightly higher orbit, could it be delivered later with a small amount of reaction mass?
Perhaps they should re-open this for bids.
Lost in space at an early age. Survived the vacuum. Now rebuilding castle in air.
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
Just think, how many days or is it hours of Iraq does it take to fund a solution to this? Not many.
Think, for what has been spent on Iraq and Afghanistan, we could have a US space station around Mars or Jupiter, maybe both.
So how do you propose to simulate, say, just one hour of continuous zero gravity?
Frankly, I don't know how useful or useless material science in zero-g is. However I'd strongly question your assertion that zero-g can be adequately simulated on earth.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"The credibility of the United States is at stake here..."
I thought that in the last 7 years (the Bush reign), we had already pretty much lost whatever credibility we once had...
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
This is Slashdot.
We're talking about NASA.
So of course it's wrong, by definition. NASA can do no right, on Slashdot.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I suspect that one additional flight could be made without recertification. Imagine, for example, that the last flight has tile damage and gets stuck in orbit...
The money is there; it is simply about priorities. Take a look at the budget to get an idea of where the money is going instead of somewhere constructive.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Some people's faith in businesses is as naive as others' faith in governments.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
>However I'd strongly question your assertion that zero-g can be adequately simulated on earth.
'Zero-gee': no, never. 'Free-fall': yes, quite well.
Witness:
http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/msad/dtf/tube.htm
(cool image: http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/msad/dtf/images/stand1.gif)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallturm_Bremen
(additional: http://www.spaceflight.esa.int/users/index.cfm?act=default.page&level=11&page=fac-dt)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop_tube
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
keep in mind, that most of the cots will come close to the ISS and then allow an arm to park them. In addition, Spacedev HAS developed a space tug using their hybrid engine (it will form the service module for their ship, if they are funded either by cots or by bigelow). The space tug could hook up with a payload and then take it back to the ISS. So, that means that for a 100-150 million, we could get CAM. In the same fashion, we could get AMS. Depending on weights, it is possible that the 2 could go up in the same launch.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If this is a truly an international disgrace and a great launch to science why don't ESA or the Russians launch it? They have the vehicles. I personally am counting the days when they deorbit ISS and move on to project Constellation.
an ill wind that blows no good
I remember working in a DoD shop, and we FREQUENTLY built shelf-ware. You'd get involved in the project, and do to the water-fall nature of the requirements, things would change so much (or get finished in time for a better tool to be built). And it went on the shelf. The worst part was you usually found out it was going on a shelf before you completed it, but you HAD to complete it to finish the contract and get some other task that would replace it... it was all very silly.
meh
The difference is that a company which failed as badly and as often as the average government would be bankrupt in a few quarters. Governments, on the other hand, just keep on going... even when the people decide to 'vote the bastards out', 99% of the bastards keep their jobs.
'Zero-gee': no, never. 'Free-fall': yes, quite well. The sentence before the one you quoted reads:
"So how do you propose to simulate, say, just one hour of continuous zero gravity?" Witness:
http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/msad/dtf/tube.htm
(cool image: http://science.nasa.gov/ssl/msad/dtf/images/stand1.gif) "For an evacuated Tube, minimal free-fall times of 4.6 seconds produce a quiescent, micro-gravity environment."
<sarcasm> OK, 4.6 seconds is very close to an hour </sarcasm> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallturm_Bremen
(additional: http://www.spaceflight.esa.int/users/index.cfm?act=default.page&level=11&page=fac-dt) "in which for 4.74 seconds (with release of the drop capsule), or for over 9 seconds (with the use of a catapult, installed in 2004) weightlessness can be produced."
Yes, that's much closer to an hour
Indeed, I'm surprised that you didn't come up with parabolic flights, which can give you up to about 25 seconds of continuous weightlessness.
OK, so where's that one-hour continuous weightlessness down here on earth?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
SPACE SCIENCE: NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Science 16 March 2007: 1476
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1476
News of the Week SPACE SCIENCE:
NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Andrew Lawler
NASA has no room on its space shuttle to launch the $1.5 billion Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer, which is designed to search for antimatter from
its perch on the international space station.
Expanded and posted on a science blog where it was being discussed:
NASA: Alpha to Omega
Category: astro
Posted on: March 18, 2007 10:39 PM, by Steinn Sigurðsson
http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2007/03/nasa_alpha_to_omega.php [scienceblogs.com]
SPACE SCIENCE: NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Lawler
Science 16 March 2007: 1476
DOI: 10.1126/science.315.5818.1476
News of the Week
SPACE SCIENCE:
NASA Declares No Room for Antimatter Experiment
Andrew Lawler
NASA has no room on its space shuttle to launch the $1.5 billion Alpha
Magnetic Spectrometer, which is designed to search for antimatter from
its perch on the international space station.
Hey, isn't that the Samuel Ting-Michael Salamon project?
Yes, it is:
http://ams.cern.ch/AMS/Secretariat/AmsWhosWho.html [ams.cern.ch]
NASA HQ is surely going WAY over the edge in punishing Michael Salamon. He was the head of fundamental Physics at NASA HQ, then they sent him to the White House, where he was for half a year or so the
Director of Physics at OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy). They pulled him out of the White House for what looks like political reasons.
This was to be the major actual Science experiment on the space station. And they are killing it -- why? I am leaning towards thinking that it is a purely political decision, as the "room" or money
argument is unconvincing, and as I say, it seems to be the #1 science project in the entire Space Station program.
If one detects even a single anti-carbon nucleus, one almost has to conclude that someplace there is an anti-star performinbg anti-nucleosyntheis, which exploded asn anti-supernova.
What a huge discovery that would be by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. For that tremendous science value per dollar ratio alone, it should fly.
I am going to write to my congressman and senators. Maybe it would be worth writing to, say, Oprah. The tax-paying public deserves to have SOME science done with their NASA tax dollars.
====
Yep, I'd like to see it launched, too. Cancelling an experiment after spending 1.5 billion to build it is just the sort of idiocy that the govenment does all the time, though.
If you follow NASA politics, though, you'd see that there's no reason to invoke any sort of "punishment" to understand this call. Griffin was given the order to cancel space shuttle by 2010. When you add up
all the things that Griffin has been instructed to do with the shuttle before the drop-dead do-not-fly-it-any-more date, and look at the maximum flight rate that's considered to be safe, there are zero flights available.
Of course, adding one more shuttle flight in 2011 would make perfect
sense-- the replacement for the shuttle won't be available for
another four years, so why not? But at the moment, that is being
considered the "camel's nose under the tent" thinking, and "cancel
shuttle by 2010" is a non-negotiable deadline.
- Show quoted text -
From the same blog and thread, a reply about Michael Salamon and the
Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer:
==========
He was the head of fundamental Physics at NASA HQ, then they sent him
to the White House, where he was for half a year or so the Director of
Physics at OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy). They pulled
him out of the White House for what looks like political reasons.
In your estimation?
Just curious.
That's only because you don't "vote the bastards out", you just alternate between the same bastards.
Take a look at the budget to get an idea of where the money is going instead of somewhere constructive.
It looks like a lot of it went to making that page as indecipherable as possible. I think someone inadvertently created a new crypto algorithm. Let's use something with a little more impact.
What?
EU can launch this JUST as much as America can. Why are they or Russia not launching it? In fact, Russia has the ability to put CAM AND AMS into orbit (progress can operate as a tug). Right now, American budget is getting very tight and we have paid for the bulk of the ISS. Russia AND EU are doing good right now.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Imagine if Aliens came down here and GAVE us all sorts of neat new technology. Why that would be just dandy, and it would solve everything.
I myself go back and forth on this. There is NO doubt that we do not belong in Iraq (and would have been out of afghanstan had idiot boy not put us in Iraq). But the simple fact is that we are there. We do not want to leave them in a worse mess (and yes, it can get MUCH worse). So, lets get back to reality.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You think on a terribly small scale. Moving the universe - just this one? Based on the research of Dr. Grumman, and using a steampunk version of the HAARP array and a child sacrifice, a gateway to a parallel universe has been opened in the Arctic. And I'm hearing good things about Dr. Malone's work on a dark-matter powered psychic sentient oracular semi-divine computer. And we'd be getting clean away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
... even when the people decide to 'vote the bastards out', 99% of the bastards keep their jobs.
And that's the government's fault??? I would advise "the people" to look in the mirror before throwing stones.
What?
What about EBay?
Have gnu, will travel.
They also would have purchased mortgage-backed securities to finance their next mission, and would now be canceling it due to the credit crunch. But before Wall Street discovered the mortgages were junk, NASA management would have paid themselves huge bonuses for that extra 2% cashflow they imagined up...
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I think we've got a pretty good head start in that category already. Another one isn't really going to matter.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
As systems guy from the 60's to 2005, I've had plenty of projects cancelled (yes - some were even due to mismanagement on my part). It's devastating on people - mostly those involved in project. One of most fundamental reasons for cancelling was bean-counter input along with cohorts in top management - mostly marketing types. So after I swore revenge for such dastardly deeds, I began to open source my projects. Or was it I wished I had? I think I may have started the open source movement. Hmmm. Anyhow the open source movement is now becoming the 'New Paradigm'. Software - hardware - telecomms - the legal profession - the oldest profession - the list is endless... So I propose all open source types get in on this project - buy the thing - whatever it is and launch it - buy the space station... Arghhhh..
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
I don't think that anyone has ever questioned the fact that strapping yourself to the top of hundreds of tons of high explosives is inherently dangerous.
To drag this further off-topic... Plenty of people have questioned that assertion. Or perhaps more accurately, plenty of people have questioned the idea of strapping yourself to a motor that can't be turned off (the SRBs and most solid motors) -- no current manned rocket actually uses high explosives for propellant. Many of these people are very smart and experienced, and many of them are trying to do something about it. Unfortunately, NASA and the current commercial providers don't seem terribly interested in attempts to reduce the risk of spaceflight by more than modest amounts.
I've worked on rocket engines. There's nothing more inherently dangerous about them than there is about a jet engine or even your car engine. All contain high energy chemicals and at least moderately high pressures. The fact that historically rocket engines are more dangerous than modern airplane engines is a result of two things: higher maturity levels in aircraft engine design, and a very curious lack of attention to safety and reliability in historical rocket engine design.
It does not have to be this way. We know how to build rocket engines that fail less often, and fail less catastrophically when they do fail. We know how to build rockets that don't kill their passengers when they fail. We need to stop assuming that space travel will always be as dangerous as it has been, and ask what we can do differently to make it safer from early in the design process. (It won't ever be completely safe, just as air travel will never be completely safe. It can, however, be continually improving in safety, and we can continue searching for ways to make it safer.)
Um, as long as we're getting the facts straight here, Challenger exploded in 1986, not 1987.
Just think, how many days or is it hours of Iraq does it take to fund a solution to this? Not many.
And only minutes if you took it from the welfare system. You could pay for dozens of the things every year just by eliminating the fraud in that system.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
If NASA were private, they wouldn't even consider launching the AMS payload in the first place, although perhaps that could be described as an improvement on the current situation.
Instead, they'd prioritize the payload that generates the most revenue; either the one the could charge the most for, or if they weren't selling payload space, the payloads that have the most near term applied results with a high probability of being licensable.
Even then, they'd only do the launch once the technology was cheap enough that the expected NPV of the gain, at normal interests rates, was arguably at least as good as putting the money into a stock market index fund.
In a nutshell, if all NASA needed to do to be effective at research is to make the same decisions a private sector entity would, then a private sector entity would be doing that research now.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Russia could use the opportunity to embarrass the US and build a launcher for it.
Table-ized A.I.
Nobody runs naked in the streets when they do discover something awesome....
...how many days or is it hours of Iraq does it take to fund a solution to this?
Rough estimate, Every day in Iraq costs us two shuttle launches. I'll play it even more conservatively. We could easily 500 times(!) every year.
Onward Christian soldiers
Marching as to war...
What?
The shuttle was *never* an optimal launch vehicle, even before the safety issues came to light
Ah? What makes you say this? A direct connection to the mind of God? A little bird told you? It's just intuitively obvious?
The only facts we have are that the Shuttle has been able to deliver umpty tons of stuff and men to LEO -- way more than can possibly be lofted by any other launch system in the world -- but at a cost which is staggeringly higher than the original projected cost in the 1970s. From those facts two conclusions are possible:
(1) The Shuttle is a uniquely stupid and expensive way to get stuff to orbit, and [insert your favorite launch candidate here, e.g. expendable rockets, space elevators, linear accelerators on mountaintops, Jetson's flying belts] would be much cheaper, even in its v1.0 implementation.
(2) The cost of getting large chunks of stuff along with men to orbit by any method is a lot more expensive than people thought in the 1970s (or even now), and the Shuttle is merely the first system to demonstrate that ugly fact.
You're entitled to pick conclusion (1), as you have, but you should keep in mind your ideas about the obvious flaws in the Shuttle system are just as theoretical and just as unverified by measured fact as were the original ideas about the obvious superiority of a Shuttle system that its 1970s engineers had.
Personally, I'd say the lesson the wise person would draw from the Shuttle experience is not that folks in the 1970s were surprisingly dumb, but that getting reliable and economical and safe access to space is way trickier than anyone ever thought it would be. Which suggests substantial humility in guessing which clever new launch design is really going to be cheaper and safer than the Shuttle.
NASA lost Challenger's crew because nobody had the guts to postpone the launch again because it was too cold and outside the operational temperature range of the SRBs. They died because someone who does not risk his/her life thought the benefit of launching in those conditions was preferable to the damage another delay would cause to his/her career. It was considered low-risk because nobody had the stomach to give any bad news to upper management and the people who should know the ship would blow-up didn't.
Another crew was lost on Columbia because nobody ever made an assessment of the damage falling foam could do to the shuttle. In more than a hundred flights, no shuttle heat shield, as vital as it is to a successful mission, was ever inspected in orbit. Damage suffered during take-off was always considered insignificant and, so, was ignored. Had anyone considered that possibility, there would be a plan-B in place to rescue the crew and land the vehicle on automatic.
BTW, if we had a vehicle that could take a shuttle crew back from LEO it could, probably, take a shuttle crew to the ISS and back and, thus, we would not need shuttles for every mission.
The shuttle is a horrible solution. It's expensive, fragile and unreliable. The fact it exists and that it sort of works is proof of the brilliance of the people who built and operates them, but it's also proof of the shortsightedness of everyone who decides what those brilliant people should build and operate.
The same dim people who manage the bright ones are to decide which experiments should go and which will never see space.
I am not optimistic.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
As a researcher who once relied on funding from NASA for my research, I can tell you where my money went: to Mars. When Bush decided that we had to put a man on Mars, suddenly funding for projects that were relevant to things right here on Earth dried up. I had been studying crystal growth phenomena under a model which ostensibly would have been tested in microgravity on the space station and like many others we got the letter essentially saying 'Thanks for all the help, but we have to send a man to Mars now so we're not renewing your grant.'
:)
Thankfully, we have been learned to be very resilient these days. It turns out that RNA's behavior is very thermodynamic and there is a whole lot of money in biophysics.
~Ben
if this means the ISS, another extremely over budget albatross around our necks, faces more limitations then so be it.
This damn thing and the shuttles has trapped us into low earth orbit for how many years?
The fact is, the shuttle system is what killed the AMS. We can't replace them and the one recent accident set us back two plus years. Add in the fact that another such accident and its all over till NASA comes up with a new launch vehicle and yes your priorities MUST change.
Idiot President or not, at least NASA and the NSF had seen continous budget increases during his term.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Despite the issues with many publicly-traded companies the fact remains that they actually do turn out productions. The mortgage bubble didn't result in my not being able to buy anything the last time I went to Walmart.
Sure, private industry does have it issues, but simply because neither private nor public solutions are perfect doesn't mean that they are equally bad for all things. They both have their pros and cons and in many cases replacing one with the other is likely to yield a significant improvement. The private solution is only likely to improve things if there is competition - that is what keeps private industry honest. (Well, except in private industries that live on government handouts - see the airline industry. It would run efficiently if the government just let half of the companies go out of business.)
It was foolish to design this sort of single purpose instrument to be attached to a space station anyway. They should have designed it to be an independent satellite put up on an Ariane.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
So how do you propose to simulate, say, just one hour of continuous zero gravity?
Won't go for an hour, but there are some fairly high drop-towers. There's also the "vomit comet" that does parabolic flight paths for longer than that.
But we're talking about enormously expensive resources on the shuttle. They need to be doing science that's a little better than 'Gee, I wonder what this material does in 0-g?'. And I say this as someone who has a materials science background.
In NASA's case, I don't think the market for manned space vessels and science vessels is large enough for free market forces to work.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Do you have a page comparing the cost of Irag to something that the US Federal Government is actually responsible for? Like the war in Afghanistan? Or maybe what we spent in Somalia or even Yugoslavia?
Hate to break the news to you, but the Federal Government is specifically tasked with running a military. Everything else listed on that web page is the responsibility of the various states. I'm not saying that the 'government' shouldn't spend money to build schools, just that the current fad of treating the President like a king and the entire US as his domain is counter-productive and contrary to our federalist system.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"This device could make discoveries that are Earth-shattering."
Then please, leave it on the ground!
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I believe that ISS does have some usefulness with OR without these attachments. Even without it, it has taught us a lot about how to work in space (and how NOT to work in space). But the CAM and ASM are 2 of the most useful ones that will help make ISS very useful.
But with that said, I am excited about seeing private space come along. Of course, they all benefit from all the knowledge, R/D that NASA (i.e. you and me) paid for.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.