In September, SpaceXвЂ™s Crew Dragon, already taking astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA, made its first commercial flight on the three-day Inspiration4 mission. Nine days later, Blue Origin flew its founder, Jeff Bezos, on its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. However, that changed in July when Virgin Galactic flew its founder, Richard Branson, to space on its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane. The Ansari X Prize competition and the occasional tourist flying on a Soyuz in the early 2000s seemed like a false dawn. But the promise of space tourism had long been just that: something that remained just around the corner. For decades, commercial human spaceflight, aka space tourism, had promised to open up space for the wider public, not just professional astronauts. What these people have in common is that they all went to space this year without the assistance of government space agencies. In the end, SpaceNews editors, reporters and trusted advisers agreed on nine individuals, organizations and trends deserving recognition.ДЄ Dutch teenager. In such a remarkable year for commercial, civil and military space, picking winners wasnвЂ™t easy. We have also seen record numbers of space startups making their way to Wall Street via mergers with blank check companies, or SPACs, attracting billions of dollars from investors undaunted by a tenacious global pandemic.ДЄnd we continue to see record numbers of satellites launching to orbit, the upshot of an entrenched smallsat revolution driving even the most hidebound institutions to rewrite their playbooks.ДЄlongside all of this, we are seeing growing concern about space sustainability driven by not just those record numbers of satellites but also slow progress on space traffic management and a Russian ASAT test that created thousands of pieces of debris in low Earth orbit.

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