Sniper Elite V2′s hyper-realistic, surgically accurate KillCam feature takes you inside your victim’s body to see precisely how your bullet will end his life. Will gamers embrace the gore, or is the KillCam a step over the line?

The creators of Sniper Elite V2, a third-person World War II shooter released this week, know that the success of a modern video game comes down to the details. They worked closely with historians to nail the feel of 1945 Berlin, all the way down to the pattern of the wallpaper inside a typical German home. The typeface on the Nazi propaganda littering the crumbling virtual urban streets is Antiqua, the preferred font of the Reich.

But the primary subject of research for the team was more, shall we say, internal: what happens when a sniper’s bullet enters a human body? They consulted medical experts, ex-military snipers, photography of real-life gunshot victims and x-rays of bone fractures, gathering a mountain of data and funneling it into through the incredibly powerful software and hardware used to create today’s videogames. The final result: a realistic simulation they call the “KillCam,” in which the camera follows a bullet as it leaves the sniper’s gun, flies through the air, hits its mark, and invades the body–with all the bone-crushing, organ-bursting, blood-spewing destruction that entails.

I went to see Sniper Elite V2 demonstrated in a hotel suite in midtown Manhattan on a weekday morning. In the room were the same three people you see in almost every product briefing: a young PR girl with a notebook, for scribbling notes about me and my reactions, which is not as flattering as you’d think; a talky representative from the developer (this one was British, and named Tim Jones; he’s the head of creative for the developer); and a stoic engineer-type, a stocky guy from the publisher who stood behind the couch and spoke very little but was outrageously, effortlessly good at the game. Before the demonstration, Jones asked if I wanted to play. I declined, theoretically so I could better observe and take notes, but mostly because I am lousy at shooting games. The stoic engineer took my place. He would be the sniper. Later, during the demonstration of co-op mode, Tim Jones would provide his ground-cover.

Jones and stoic engineer played that cooperative mode in a burned-out Berlin in 1945. The game is fairly cleverly designed, as far as shooters go; it’s not a “shoot everyone in sight” sort of game–not a “run and gun,” said Jones–but one much more about stealth and strategy. This level found the players tasked with destroying a cargo truck, which in turn required several sub-tasks to set up the final shoot-the-truck sequence. They’d have to draw enemies away from the truck, plant explosive charges, and set them off (by, not entirely realistically, shooting the glowing red fuel caps around the outside of the truck). While going through that checklist, Nazis would need to be dispatched. The stoic engineer would pick off long-range targets, and Tim Jones would set traps and place bombs.

You’re killing people. And that’s a messy business.I was going to ask the players to show me the KillCam, basically the entire reason I was there. Th KillCam is triggered only when a particularly well-placed shot is fired, and I didn’t want to watch these guys play videogames like I did in middle school when I was bad at Battletoads and hanging out in friends’ basements. I didn’t have to worry. Within a minute, I saw it. The target: a mirror image of the stoic engineer’s own player, a Nazi sniper perched a few hundred yards away on the roof of an abandoned building, ducking behind a shard of concrete that once may have been a wall. The stoic engineer found his target, lowered the crosshairs expertly on the enemy–not directly on the enemy, but slightly above, because at this distance, the player has to adjust for the effects of gravity. (On expert levels, you also have to contend with wind, and the game features heart rate and breath-pattern meters–your shot will be more accurate if you shoot with a low heart rate and empty lungs.)

Immediately the game paused for the KillCam cutscene. Everyone stop what you’re doing and watch this.

The bullet exploded out of the muzzle of the Gewehr rifle, emerging in a bright, jagged flash. The camera pulled back as it began its flight through the air, then quickly swung to the side. You could see the bullet rotate, see the waves, like dreamy smoke rings, left in its wake. The music muted slightly. Then, up ahead, I saw the mirror-image Nazi sniper, directly in the bullet’s path. Time slowed down even more as the bullet approached its target. It’s a perfect head-shot, an achievement. The stoic engineer will receive a small digital trophy for this, an award that will pop up in the corner of the screen. The camera rotated back behind the bullet to follow it as it got closer and closer to the enemy. Then it reached the enemy’s face. Suddenly the Nazi’s skin peeled back, like a Venetian blind rolling up, snapping backwards over his skull. I saw the bare, perfectly clean bone, the teeth, grinning and eerie, the spinal column beneath with its visible path of nerves. The bullet splattered through the cornea, shattered the bones of the eye-socket and cheek, broke through the blood vessels at the back of the eye, burst backwards through the brain cavity and punched a hole in the back of the skull, its course realistically altered by its journey. Blood and bone shot upwards, outwards, backwards. The entire cutscene took maybe eight seconds.

“Nice shot,” says the talky representative. “Thanks,” mutters the stoic engineer. I’d see the KillCam several more times, would see “Vital Hit” bullets pierce vital organs in the chest cavity (heart, lungs, liver, kidney), break ribs, turn collarbones and pelvic bones into coarse fragments of bone, and, on one memorable occasion, would see a bullet strike a hand grenade the enemy wore on a belt. The grenade exploded, almost robbing us of the full force of the KillCam, the Nazi’s body reduced to pulp and shrapnel in the blunt force of the grenade, negating any need for an x-ray image of his death. (The name of this type of shot, for some reason: a “potato masher.”) Not as clean as the sniper round, but rarer. The talky representative was excited to explain to me what had happened. “Did you see that? He hit the grenade!”

“Wow,” I said.

* * *

What struck me most about seeing these guys play the game was how businesslike they were. Partly that’s because these guys are the creators of the game: they’ve played it, I’m sure, hundreds or thousands of times already. Nothing in the game surprises them. But there was no posturing, no “Fucking awesome, man!” when a Nazi met his grisly end, not even for my benefit. No high fives, no elbow nudges, no cheering, no grins. Instead, in between the talky representative’s steady monologue about the intricacies of Sniper Elite V2′s gameplay, which I mostly ignored, there was quiet cooperation. “Coming up the stairs on your left,” said the stoic engineer, who could see the talky representative’s avatar from his sky-high perch on the rooftops. “Cheers,” said the talky representative, as he set a tight-wire explosive trap, which the Nazis would trip when they reached the top of the stairs. Upon their explosion, the stoic engineer and the talky representative didn’t so much give a nod of approval. They moved away from the doorway, because the explosion, while effective, had given their position away. They weren’t watching an action movie. They were working.

And that’s part of the what makes Sniper Elite V2 so interesting. It is easily the most graphic, violent video game I’ve ever seen, but the violence is relatively realistic, not cartoony. The game has the dubious honor of humanizing Nazis more than any of the scores of WWII-era games, films, and books that came before it: these are not anonymous targets, dispatched from far away with the tug of the R-trigger: once you see testicles exploded, fingers severed, an artery slashed open by the force of your bullet, that you shot, from your own gun, you feel the effects of your actions in a way I didn’t expect. The original idea might well have been to create the most extreme, violent period shooter ever made. Blood! Guts! X-rays! But the effect is the complete opposite. You’re not yanking a cartoon ninja’s spine out of his body with your bare hands, or stabbing a shrieking purple alien with a glowing light-sword. You’re killing people. And that’s a messy business.

* * *

For all its talk of realism–the publisher has billed the game as “the most brutally realistic military sharpshooter out there”–there are serious lapses in realism throughout the game. It’s realistic until realism interferes with the fun of the game, at which point realism can be cheerfully abandoned. Having to monitor your heart rate, wind speed and direction, and the precise loss of altitude your bullet will experience due to gravity over distance? Those are realistic variables, and fun ones. But with rare exceptions, a shot to the torso will kill any target. An exploded kidney will drop a Nazi like a stone, just as dead as if he’d been shot through the frontal lobe. Shots to the wrists or knees will sometimes mean instant death, for some reason (although most times, a leg shot will topple the enemy, leaving him to scream for help from his comrades–whom you can then take down).

But the question of realism isn’t an easy one to answer–as a player, you don’t really have the option of trotting over to a Nazi you’ve just shot in the torso to see if the splinters of bone fragment from his ribcage have reacted in a realistic way to the effects of the cavitation caused by the bullet, or if the enemy is bleeding out from a shot to the femoral artery in an appropriate time frame. You get, at most, two seconds of the bullet entering the body, then it’s time to move on to the next target.

You yourself are remarkably bulletproof–you can take several direct hits before having to duck behind cover and heal up, which you will, automatically. You’ll score “two-in-ones” fairly often, in which you’ll kill two enemies with a single bullet. In the real world, that shot is referred to as a “Quigley,” a reference to a 1990 Tom Selleck movie. It’s extremely rare.

The AI are smart enough to locate you due to sound, but hiding for a few seconds will send them back to their regular rounds, where they seem not to notice that they have to step over the bodies of their fellow soldiers who were shot by a hidden sniper moments before. “Oh well, back to the patrol!” It’s not tremendously more complex than the stealth mechanics of Sly Cooper, which is a decade-old game about a cartoon master thief raccoon and his two friends, a turtle and a hippopotamus.

* * *

You still get extra points for hitting a vital organ.The motives for creating this element of the game are murky, by necessity. It would be sort of untoward and unnecessarily confrontational for Jones and the other representatives from Rebellion and 505 Games to be vocal about the awesomeness of shooting somebody in the kidney and watching it rupture. Jones said it would be false to claim that the “visceral ‘wow’ factor [...] wasn’t a big factor in our decision to design and implement it that way.” Sniping feels like a relatively mechanical way of killing someone–you’re removed from the act itself, separated by distance and the glass of the scope, making adjustments for wind and gravity and angle in the same way you adjust the steering wheel to keep your car in its lane. “It does force players to reflect on the fate of their enemies in a way that many other games gloss over,” he said.

He also referred to the KillCam, in a sort of action-movie, U.S.-Army-recruiting video way, as a “heroic death sequence” for the fallen enemy. That’s just one of a whole mess of ways to approach the game–in your gut, you may think it’s noble, or you may think it’s brutal, or, as much of the chat on messageboards shows, you may think it’s awesome.

The messageboards are full of comments like this: “It’d be cool if they’d allow for a replay kill-cam, with a rotatable/zoom-able camera with editing tools and the ability to upload your videos to [Xbox] Live/PSN for others to watch.” Or excited folks who “just got [their] first nut-shot.” For them, the KillCam is just a new gore-delivery system, the latest in a long line of mildly transgressive evolutions in gaming violence. Shooting games are a dime a dozen, and as much as Tim tried to insist to me that what really sets Sniper Elite V2 apart from the pack is its stealth mechanics, I know better. Stealth isn’t new. Watching your bullet puncture a lung from the inside, that’s new. The trailers lean heavily on the gore. And no matter how educational or perspective-altering the KillCams are, you still get extra points for hitting a vital organ.

Reviews so far are mixed, but all mention the KillCam. The GameSpot review calls the KillCam shots “gruesome and gratifying” and “delightfully gory,” and says “they never get old.” The Official Xbox Magazine review uses the phrase “buckets of red awesomesauce.” GameInformer’s Tim Turi self-identifies as a “gore hound,” but even he notes that “some of these kills made my stomach twitch a bit.”

Mine too.

Building a next-generation jet engine isn’t easy, but from the cool confines of a blacked out holographic chamber in Brooklyn, it can at least be easier. Here, GE and its partners at BBDO New York have assembled ThrottleUp, an immersive 3-D holographic experience that lets users build one of GE’s new energy efficient GEnx jet engines using a gesture controlled holographic interface.

ThrottleUp was assembled in just three weeks from an impressive battery of technologies, including the same Musion Eyeliner projection technology that brought Tupac Shakur back to the stage for a posthumous performance at Coachella last month and a SoftKinetic sensor camera that captures the user’s hand movements. And while yes, it is basically a huge advertisement for GE, the finished product is a legitimately cool, technologically dazzling thing to see (and feel and hear).

“We wanted to show people how beautiful and amazing this engine is, but we didn’t just want to do 3-D,” says Neely Lisk, BBDO New York’s interactive producer on the project. Instead they’ve created a system that dazzles on all fronts–not just visually but sonically and texturally as well. When you step into the custom built chamber, the motion sensor puts you through two quick motions to sync itself to your body. Then the room goes black and the fun begins.

In a starry sky over a nighttime cityscape floats a disorganized cluster of real GE jet engine parts, each one slowly whirling in high-detail 3-D. Taking cues from the system, you then start to piece together the engine components using hand gestures, gathering parts into clusters that self assemble into larger pieces of the GEnx engine. You then fit the larger pieces together to produce a full working engine, which attaches to a jetliner that streaks away into the distance.

If it sounds like a simple video game, it’s not. It’s richer, more immersive, and far more technologically dazzling when you’re standing in a near pitch black space moving the world around you.

“The SoftKinetic camera ran software we licensed in order to use the camera sensors, but everything else was more or less a custom build,” Lisk says. “We were working through the night to implement new code. Setting up took hours to get the Musion film where it needed to be. Float was testing in its office in San Francisco, so there was no way for us to actually test until it was built. We kind of had to hold hands and pray that it would all work.”

Float refers to Float Hybrid Entertainment, the company that custom-developed the game engine that ran the overall experience. Effects companies LMG and Framestore delivered custom visual and sound effects that were derived from real CAD drawings of GEnx engine parts and sounds recorded from factory floors, while Musion delivered its patented projection technology that relies on a thin film stretched at a 45-degree angle toward the viewer that reflects images projected onto it from above as 3-D images–a film that had to be hung with two tons of tension to work properly. The team even contracted out a custom musical score to serve as background for the experience.

Blended together with the motion-controlled interactivity supplied by the SoftKinetic sensor array, the entire experience is as immersive as it gets and a nod to what future storytelling can be. Why watch when you can participate?

“We believe in taking storytelling to the next level,” Lisk says. “And this is something you can see and feel and touch.”

What exactly do you feel and touch? GE and BBDO didn’t leave out this sensory aspect in ThrottleUp but we don’t want to spoil the surprise ending for you, though we’re fairly sure you’ll be blown away. If you’re around the NYC area, Throttle up is free and open to the public through Friday, May 11 at 56 Water Street in Dumbo. It’s worth checking out.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-d800-d800e/

“When the Nikon D800 was announced, the specification that got everyone’s attention was – and to a large degree still is – the massive pixel count of its 36.3MP CMOS sensor. When a moderately-sized full-frame DSLR body aspires to go toe-to-toe with medium format cameras and backs at a fraction of their price, other attributes can seem secondary.”

DPReview.com has reviewed the D800, and what can I say? It’s a phenomenal camera. The 36 megapixel sensor is truly state of the art, and the camera built around it is no slouch either. If you ask me, this is the FX and DX camera of the moment. Shoot it at 36 megapixel for class-leading resolution, or downsize it to 12 megapixels to exceed the D700′s performance. Shoot at 15.3 megapixel for a DX crop that beats the D7000. Now, if only I can find the money for it somehow. On a more curious note, I wonder why DPReview upsampled the Canon 5DIII files instead of downsampling the D800 files; usually that makes the image that is being upsampled look a lot worse. Still, great camera. Time to raid the piggy bank, I think.

Building a next-generation jet engine isn’t easy, but from the cool confines of a blacked out holographic chamber in Brooklyn, it can at least be easier. Here, GE and its partners at BBDO New York have assembled ThrottleUp, an immersive 3-D holographic experience that lets users build one of GE’s new energy efficient GEnx jet engines using a gesture controlled holographic interface.

ThrottleUp was assembled in just three weeks from an impressive battery of technologies, including the same Musion Eyeliner projection technology that brought Tupac Shakur back to the stage for a posthumous performance at Coachella last month and a SoftKinetic sensor camera that captures the user’s hand movements. The result is something that takes just a few moments to acquaint itself with a user’s body before launching him or her into an interactive holographic experience.

“We wanted to show people how beautiful and amazing this engine is, but we didn’t just want to do 3-D,” says Neely Lisk, BBDO New York’s interactive producer on the project. Instead they’ve created a system that dazzles on all fronts–not just visually but sonically and texturally as well. When you step into the custom built chamber, the motion sensor puts you through two quick motions to sync itself to your body. Then the room goes black and the fun begins.

In a starry sky over a nighttime cityscape floats a disorganized cluster of real GE jet engine parts, each one slowly whirling in high-detail 3-D. Taking cues from the system, you then start to piece together the engine components using hand gestures, gathering parts into clusters that self assemble into larger pieces of the GEnx engine. You then fit the larger pieces together to produce a full working engine, which attaches to a jetliner that streaks away into the distance.

If it sounds like a simple video game, it’s not. It’s richer, more immersive, and far more technologically dazzling when you’re standing in a near pitch black space moving the world around you.

“The SoftKinetic camera ran software we licensed in order to use the camera sensors, but everything else was more or less a custom build,” Lisk says. “We were working through the night to implement new code. Setting up took hours to get the Musion film where it needed to be. Float was testing in its office in San Francisco, so there was no way for us to actually test until it was built. We kind of had to hold hands and pray that it would all work.”

Float refers to Float Hybrid Entertainment, the company that custom-developed the game engine that ran the overall experience. Effects companies LMG and Framestore delivered custom visual and sound effects that were derived from real CAD drawings of GEnx engine parts and sounds recorded from factory floors, while Musion delivered its patented projection technology that relies on a thin film stretched at a 45-degree angle toward the viewer that reflects images projected onto it from above as 3-D images–a film that had to be hung with two tons of tension to work properly. The team even contracted out a custom musical score to serve as background for the experience.

Blended together with the motion-controlled interactivity supplied by the SoftKinetic sensor array, the entire experience is as immersive as it gets and a nod to what future storytelling can be. Why watch when you can participate?

“We believe in taking storytelling to the next level,” Lisk says. “And this is something you can see and feel and touch.”

What exactly do you feel and touch? GE and BBDO didn’t leave out this sensory aspect in ThrottleUp but we don’t want to spoil the surprise ending for you, though we’re fairly sure you’ll be blown away. If you’re around the NYC area, Throttle up is free and open to the public through Friday, May 11 at 56 Water Street in Dumbo. It’s worth checking out.

A private, non-governmental space cargo company

The private space industry is holding its breath for later this month when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will lift off en route to the International Space Station. It will be a milestone for commercial spaceflight — no more will Americans have to rely solely on Russia or other international partners to get stuff into space. It will also enable an entire private space ecosystem, one in which private companies design and build experiments, send them to space and gather data, all with minimal astronaut help. A small company called Nanoracks, which made headlines lately for its plans to send components of Ardbeg single-malt whisky to the ISS, will be the first commercial cargo to fly on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.

As startups go, the company is not terribly unusual — it’s self-funded, it’s helmed by energetic and feisty leaders, and it’s filling a small but lucrative niche. But this is space exploration we’re talking about, and that makes Nanoracks a bit different. The company started with a goal to avoid working with government funds, a rarity in space exploration, according to the company’s managing director, Jeffrey Manber.

“With that money comes problems. They look over your shoulder, they design everything, they tell you what to do,” he said. “We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to create a company that would have low prices, reach out to the public, and increase the number of people who use the space station.”

Manber has done it before, as CEO of a company called MirCorp, which leased the former Russian space station Mir. Nanoracks signed an agreement with NASA in September 2009 and now sends small experiments to the space station, on behalf of anything from private companies like Ardbeg to entire school districts and their eager students. The company’s motto, “Space 4 Everyone,” encompasses what Manber and his colleagues want to do with the space industry — a modular approach with plug-and-play components that can be easily and cheaply customized and mass-produced.

“Up to now, space hardware has been like a pocket watch. It’s beautiful craftsmanship, done well. And we’re trying to Walmart the business,” he said. “We’re saying, look, here’s a box. … There are companies now creating circuit boards that fit inside Nanolabs. We’re starting an entire private-sector ecosystem in low-Earth orbit.”

In anticipation of SpaceX’s historic launch — and the prospect of space scotch whisky — PopSci talked to Manber about Nanoracks’ business plan and future goals.

PopSci: How does a Nanolab work?
Jeffrey Manber: You can do a lot of good science and a lot of good education in a Nanolab. They are four inches cubed, and we put a USB port in it, so we call it the ultimate plug and play. You design something in a Nanolab, it goes up in a standard camera bag, goes to the station, an astronaut takes it out, and just attaches it with a USB port to our platform. The platform holds 16 Nanolabs. That’s plugged into the power of the station, and the data flows down to the customer.

We say we’re the world’s first commercial lab in space. We don’t seek profit from the hardware; we seek to profit from the utilization. The big boys make their money from building things. Nobody really shows a good revenue stream from customer utilization, and that’s what we’re looking to change.

“We’re trying to Walmart the business of space”
PS: What have you sent up, aside from some scotch components?
JM: We have flown about 20 payloads, and we have over 60 payloads under contract. We’ve flown 27 school districts, with our educational partners at the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. We have 11 more school districts flying in the next few months. This is all with no NASA funding — school districts are coming up with the funds. We’ve flown an experiment for the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies of Israel, we did a stem cell experiment for an organization in Romania. We are the first commercial cargo on the SpaceX launch on May 7.

PS: A few weeks ago, NASA awarded Nanoracks a contract to build a commercial research platform on the exterior of the ISS. What’s that for?
JM: The External Platform Program is a $1.5 million contract for a four-Nanolab setup. Nanoracks and Astrium are coming up with the money. NASA is providing hardware to us that was in a warehouse, and some services.

The market for that is for sensors, earth observation, testing of advanced satellite components. So that’s an entirely different market. We also got a contract with Virgin Galactic a few months ago to build their research rack, and we’re building that now. For the first time, you’ll be able to start very inexpensively and quickly, on SpaceShipTwo, build a lab, fly it at suborbital altitudes, and then if you want you can put it on the ISS next.

What this is showing is the proper relationship that can and should exist between NASA and a company. NASA is our landlord. It’s our regulator — all payloads have to pass NASA safety checks. And it’s sometimes our customer — they have purchased 7 Nanolabs. They’re a customer, a regulator, but not a competitor. For too long, NASA was a competitor to the private sector. We are proof that NASA is evolving.

PS: What’s your price list? Can I send something up?
JM: It’s like buying a car — there’s a sticker price and there’s little add-ons. If you’re a student, a single Nanolab will cost $30,000. That gets you everything — the ride up, 30 days on the station, power, data, astronaut installing it in the platform, and a little bit of our help. It could cost more if you want air conditioning and other options. If you want payload return, we might charge more.

The basic commercial price is $60,000. Some companies do it with two or four together, which will run $250,000. Those prices are just unheard of for the space station. And we’re very proud of this: We’re averaging nine months from when the payload applies, to when we fly.

We honor the image of a U.S. national lab, so we don’t do coffee mugs or souvenirs. But you could come to us and say, ‘I want to study earthworms, or I want to grow plants, or test radiation.’ We could walk you through that, or your science teacher could, and we would give you insight in to how it gets through safety review. Within a year, you may pay us $30,000-$40,000, and it may cost you $5,000 or $10,000. You’d have a project that students absolutely will remember for the rest of their lives. And not only is it real science, but it happens in their attention spans. With the shuttle program, projects would take six or seven years. This changes everything.

PS: So how did Ardbeg get involved?
JM: Our chief financial officer is a scotch lover, and knew somebody associated with Ardbeg. We began talking to them about doing an experiment to see how these terpenes work in space. The key is that things must be done for education on a U.S. national lab. The company had to learn this was not simply a commercial project, but it was for education. Terpenes have never been studied in zero gravity, so that works. At the root of it, it’s an interesting educational process. In two years, we’ll bring down their mixtures that are up there, and see if the processes that took place are different in space. We may learn things about terpenes we did not otherwise know, and that has applications for not just beverages, but cosmetics, perfumes, etc. In five years, you may be drinking a soft drink with a fascinating new flavor that came out of the U.S. national lab.

We got some negative flak because it was for whisky, but there is no whisky on the station. I applaud NASA for understanding that this is an interesting experiment. After this, we were contacted by a flavoring company asking, what can you do in zero gravity? For instance, oil and vinegar in a salad dressing doesn’t mix on the ground. In space, it mixes. So what other compounds we use on the Earth, in food or in manufacturing, etc., may be created in space? It’s a serious effort.

PS: Has anything ever been rejected?
JM: We work on it from the beginning, and we’ll tell a company ‘don’t use this,’ or if you’re going to use plastic, use this plastic approved by NASA. Safety review goes through three levels. Nanoracks makes sure there’s nothing NASA will reject out of hand. At the second review, they will say, can you tweak this, or why are you using this. You come back for the third, and you show what’s been done and it gets accepted. Nothing has been rejected yet. Although we had huge problems with the iPhone. It was done because our customer, Odyssey Research, said we could use an iPhone because it has accelerometers, gyros and other sensors. NASA said they wanted to get it up quickly, but the batteries had to be certified. And you’re dealing with an iconic brand — that was a very difficult project.

PS: What else do you want to send up?
JM: We’re getting a lot of biological processes from students and commercial people, applications for cancer, stem cells, how materials interact. We’re getting some materials research, some botany projects, growing plants; projects about understanding the environment of space. There’s still a lot to learn 50 years into the space age.
But if NASA was to relax a little bit more, we would get also creative things like art. I want to unleash some of the artists. But so far, NASA is still a little reluctant on that.
Still, this is a precious new resource of the United States. We spent billions of dollars on this thing, and it’s open for business now.