Want to go to space? It could cost you.

This month, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft will make the first fully-private, crewed flight to the International Space Station. The going price for a seat is US$55 million. The ticket comes with an eight-day stay on the space station, including room and board—and unrivaled views.

Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin offer cheaper alternatives, which will fly you to the edge of space for a mere US$250,000–500,000. But the flights only last between ten and 15 minutes, barely enough time to enjoy an in-flight snack.

But if you're happy to keep your feet on the ground, things start to look more affordable. Over the past 20 years, advances in tiny satellite technology have brought Earth orbit within reach for small countries, private companies, university researchers, and even do-it-yourself hobbyists.

Science in space

We are scientists who study our planet and the universe beyond. Our research stretches to space in search of answers to fundamental questions about how our ocean is changing in a warming world, or to study the supermassive black holes beating in the hearts of distant galaxies.

While telescope alignment continues, the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) is still in cooldown mode. MIRI, which will be the coldest of Webb's four instruments, is the only instrument that will be actively cooled by a cryogenic refrigerator, or cryocooler. This cryocooler uses helium gas to carry heat from MIRI's optics and detectors out to the warm side of the sunshield. To manage the cooldown process, MIRI also has heaters onboard, to protect its sensitive components from the risk of ice forming. The Webb team has begun progressively adjusting both the cryocooler and these heaters, to ensure a slow, controlled, stable cooldown for the instrument. Soon, the team will turn off MIRI's heaters entirely, to bring the instrument down to its operating temperature of less than 7 kelvins (-447 degrees Fahrenheit, or -266 degrees Celsius).

In the meantime, after achieving alignment with the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), Webb engineers have begun aligning the telescope to the remaining near-infrared instruments, a six-week process.

NASA's upcoming SPHEREx mission will have some similarities with the James Webb Space Telescope. But the two observatories will take dramatically different approaches to studying the sky.

The SPHEREx mission will be able to scan the entire sky every six months and create a map of the cosmos unlike any before. Scheduled to launch no later than April 2025, it will probe what happened within the first second after the Big Bang, how galaxies form and evolve, and the prevalence of molecules critical to the formation of life, like water, locked away as ice in our galaxy.

As human activity extends outward into the solar system, we'll need a way to keep track of space junk, and the growing number of missions around the moon and beyond.

Recently, the newly-formed U.S. Space Force announced plans to create CHPS, the Cis-lunar Highway Patrol System. Despite an acronym harking back to a certain cheesy TV series in the 1970s, CHPS will provide a serious look at space traffic further out in orbit around the Earth-moon system. Such a network is vital, as private companies and space agencies are set to return to the moon in a big way in the coming decade.

"The CHPS program will deliver space domain awareness, in a region that is one thousand times greater than our current area of responsibility," says CHPS program manager Michael Lopez in a recent press release. "AFRL is interested in hearing from companies that may have ideas that differ from ours, and could contribute to the satellite's capabilities."

The problem was highlighted recently with the impact of a rocket booster on the moon on March 4.