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The article focuses on the plan of the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) to make the Common Berthing Mechanism (CBM) available for future commercial space stations. Topics covered include the issuance by NASA of a request for information (RFI ) for the plan, how a commercial module could advance its efforts to hand off low Earth orbit (LEO) to the private sector, and the hope of NASA of a broader partnership on the controlled assembly of the International Space Station (ISS).

The author comments on the New Space business or the emergent private spaceflight industry. He discusses Orbital ATK chief executive officer (CEO) David Thompson's concerns about the New space cycle and mentions the cycle of spaceflight delusions which started from the 1970s to the space shuttle Challenger tragedy in 1986 and the obsessions with low-Earth-orbit satellite systems in 1995-2000.