Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff this week, killing all 157 people onboard and triggering a storm in the aviation industry. The aircraft was a Boeing 737 Max 8—the same type involved when Lion Air Flight 610 plummeted into the sea off Indonesia just five months earlier. Despite similarities between the events, aviation expert Peter Lemme believes they are unrelated.

With a regulatory embrace of private spaceflight (“new space”), spacecraft development costs falling, and better remote sensing and data analytics capabilities, funding to space tech companies has grown from almost nothing in 2012, to approximately $4B in combined funding over the past two years, buoyed especially by entrepreneur-celebrities Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.