Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier had reason to be upbeat during the company’s earnings call last week. The company’s mothership, VMS Eve, had flown back to Spaceport America the day before following a 16-month overhaul at the Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field in California.

BROOMFIELD, Colo. — The battle over what – if any – government safety regulations will be formulated for people flying on Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic suborbital vehicles and the right of those passengers to sue in the event of an accident was on full display at the Next-generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC) in Colorado this week.

Blue Origin is still investigating the in-flight failure of its New Shepard rocket last September that resulted in the abort of a capsule carrying a load of experiments, the system’s chief architect said on Tuesday.

WhiteKnightTwo took to the air again on Monday morning. Virgin Galactic’s Eve mothership, named after company founder Richard Branson’s mum, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field in California. After flying in circles over the Mojave Desert, it headed east to New Mexico where it flew circle over Spaceport America before landing on the facility’s only runway after a flight of 5 hours 33 minutes.

Welcome this week’s S-SPACⁱ.

Intuitive Machines (NAS: LUNR) debuted on the NASDAQ exchange on Tuesday after the company received only a fraction of the amount it had planned to raise by merging with the Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Welcome to our newest feature, SpaceTech Briefs. Today we’ll look at some of the things NASA is doing these days.

NASA Looks to Open Suborbital Flights to Researchers

While NASA has been happy to provide funding for microgravity experiments and technology demonstrations on suborbital flights by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, it has drawn the line at funding its own personnel to fly along with their payloads. That could soon change, however.

Welcome to this week’s S-SPACⁱ.

Lunar lander builder Intuitive Machines looks to join the Space SPAC index this week. Shareholders are set to vote on its reverse merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. on Wednesday morning. If the deal goes through, the Houston-based company will begin trading on Nasdaq under the symbol LUNR.

After a 15-month overhaul, Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo VMS Eve carrier aircraft is once again basking in the bright sunshine of the Mojave Desert as it prepares for taxi tests today. Follow www.twitter.com/spacecom for updates.

There were 12 suborbital flights last year that tested inflatable heat shields, scramjet and hypersonic propulsion, spy satellite cameras, and reusable launch vehicle technologies. Flights were conducted from the United States, India, Japan, Germany, Brazil and North Korea.

Once a sleepy backwater largely focused on scientific research, the suborbital launch sector has boomed in recent years. Private companies and governments across the globe conducted 29 flights to test orbital and suborbital launch vehicles and a range of technologies last year.