Amidst the gloom of yet another big program cancel at NASA, there definitely seems to be more than a little bit of silver lining. This all sounds like stuff people outside the agency have been urging NASA to try for years, if not decades. Seems to me that, at least since the 1970s, NASA's most successful programs have been ones in which they do research nobody else thinks will go anywhere, or that'll be put in the public domain once the project's done. This seems to re-focus the manned space flight segment in that very direction.