For cost reasons the space agency is more and more interested in using Java for safety-critical missions. Until recently the lack of a time-predictable standard library has been a major hurdle to Java adoption in that particular field. It is no more the case as demonstrated by this AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) paper [.pdf] presented the first day of the Space 2007 conference (Long Beach, CA) and introducing the first fully time-deterministic (and open-source) library for Java: Javolution.
