not really surprising since saft is the only military-accredited lipo manufacturer and the french government holds mayor stackes in saft and the arianne program. i´d love to see them rate the cells used in space for comparision with the commonly available series they don´t even have priced in the web to see if there are some similarities.
as fro degradation over time, the apce is pretty cold so they can hybernate pretty chilled, also saft has good expertise on alternative activating sequences on batterie ( see their marine cells), so there may be another trick than just freezing them at 50+% charging state and warming them up and top them of short in before schedulable use.
