Companies and organizations can spend years developing experiments and other payloads for a space mission. Those payloads are then subjected to risks beyond the control of their owners. A launch failure or a satellite anomaly means all that effort was for naught.

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Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science...