I would like to send a personal Thank You to AMSAT and the ARISSat-1 Team.
You overcame an enormous amount of challenges in order to make this happen. I am personally thankful for all of your hard work. From a technical standpoint, you had to manage a design change (suitsat -> arissat), the new design, materials, fabrication, assembly and software. From a scheduling standpoint, you had to deal with volunteer schedules, NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency and all sorts of other events. From a logistics standpoint, you had to move materials all over the planet so that everyone could do their part.
And keep in mind, the volunteers making this happen mostly have full-time jobs, families and many other things to do :-)
When I tell non-ham (non-Amsat people) that I know how: """AMSAT built a satellite 'in a garage', had it delivered to the ISS and it's now in orbit sending down pictures, yadda, yadda""", you should see the looks on peoples faces!! I get the goose bumps just thinking about it.
It is truly an amazing feat and an outstanding accomplishment for AMSAT.
As far as the failures are concerned, I will defer to a magnet that I have on my workbench that says: "Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm".
Thank you all for your hard work, Joseph Armbruster