Discovery flying "new business model" to space station

Aviation Week has published a terrific article on the April Shuttle Discovery flight, STS-131, that will take the innovative microgravity research NanoRacks platform and two "Cubelabs" to the International Space Station. The flight is more than a simple delivery of hardware built right here in Kentucky, exciting as that is: When the space shuttle Discovery lifts off for the International
Space Station next month, a small commercial payload called a NanoRack,
tucked into its middeck cargo space, could be a harbinger of how the
U.S. hopes to do business in space in the years to come.Discovery’s
crew will take a few minutes during the busy mission to transfer the
Express Rack locker insert carrying the NanoRack into the ISS. Later, a
station crewmember will plug it into an open Express Rack slot in
Japan’s Kibo laboratory module.Inside the NanoRack
will be a few pathfinder experiments designed to characterize its
working environment for future paying customers. If all goes as
planned, the privately funded device eventually could generate payouts
of more than $800,000, four or five times a year, for NanoRacks LLC,
the company that developed it and set up the Space Act agreement with
NASA that allows the payloads to ...