In article , John Doe wrote:
That hatch (CBM) is about to get very useless when the shuttle is
retired and the whole concept of MPLM becomes moot, unless the Japanese
actually develop and produce their HTV.

Or unless either the CEV or one of the COTS commercial vehicles berths to
a CBM instead of docking. Which several of the COTS designs do; I'm not
sure about the Continued Employment Vehicle. (For a while it was going to
use a new lightweight docking interface, if I recall correctly, but that
has since been canceled.) That's what the shuttle *should* have done,
instead of using the CBM interface only for the separate MPLMs.
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