NASA has awarded Astrobotic a $199.5 million contract to deliver the Volatiles Investigation Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) to the Moon’s south pole in 2023, where it will search for water ice deposits that could be useful to future astronauts.

The director of the White House National Space Council believes NASA’s push to return astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024 is helping the agency significantly streamline its decision-making, though there’s more to do.

As the commercial space market grows, how can industry incentivize efforts to clean up orbital debris?

The design concept for the habitation and logistics elements of the lunar-orbiting Gateway that  NASA is pursuing under a $187 million contract with Northrop Grumman has a significant heritage in the evolving Cygnus resupply mission spacecraft that have so far launched and berthed successfully to the International Space Station 13 times since September 2013.

The U.S. arm of Japanese satellite servicing startup Astroscale is expanding into geostationary orbit by acquiring the assets of Israeli company Effective Space Solutions.

“It’s truly a critical moment in the development of the space economy and a new era of private human spaceflight,” NASDAQ’s president and CEO said just before the astronauts rang the bell in the station’s U.S. segment.

“Things worked exactly the way we expected them to work," Demo-2 astronaut Doug Hurley said. " It’s a pretty awe-inspiring trip so far, pretty humbling,”

“I’m very confident that we’ll continue to fund NASA and fund NASA aggressively,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said shortly after SpaceX's Demo-2 mission successfully docked with the International Space Station.