The rise of launch companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab have shown the U.S. government how it can leverage the investment of private companies to reduce its costs and improve its technologies.

Low-Earth-orbit launch upstart Rocket Lab will become a publicly traded company Aug. 25 after shareholders approved a reverse merger with Vector Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, grossing three-quarters of a billion dollars for the 15-year-old rocket company.

U.S. Transportation Command has asked launch companies and academics to provide cost estimates for delivering military cargo via space over the next 20 years. 

Unlike some planetary destinations, the asteroid Psyche was never the target of a spacecraft flyby before becoming an orbital destination for a $1 billion NASA probe, which is adding to the challenge as the Psyche mission team prepares for a planned launch one year from now.

One of the James Webb Space Telescope’s early science tasks, called COSMOS-Webb, will be a wide and deep mapping of the 13.7 billion-year-old universe.

Blue Origin’s next New Shepard flight will test the upgraded lidar and descent landing computer NASA is developing to enable lunar landings at sites that were considered too challenging during the Apollo era.

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa signed an agreement Aug. 18 to share remote sensing data.

NASA’s nine-year-old Mars Curiosity rover is climbing out of a region rich in clay minerals that likely formed in a warmer, wet era on the now cold and dry red planet to a region dominated by salty minerals called sulfates, the agency said on Aug. 17.