Public fireworks shows may be in short supply this weekend due to the pandemic, but Rocket Lab is ready to fill the gap. It’s planning to launch its 13th mission, “Pics Or It Didn’t Happen,” from a complex on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 5:19PM Eastern with a livestream (below) available 15 minutes before takeoff. The launch window is open until 6:03PM Eastern. This is only the third Rocket Lab launch this year, due in no small part to the pandemic, and it includes some significant payloads.

The main payload is a Canon satellite, CE-SAT-IB, that will demo high-res and wide angle cameras for Earth imaging — if all goes well, this will pave the way for mass production. Planet, the company behind the largest network of Earth observation satellites, is also including five of its newest-generation SuperDove satellites. It’s also an important mission for the UK with In-Space launching its first Faraday cubesat mission to help startups and researchers get payloads into orbit.

The tiny satellite (it weighs just 55lbs) will first conduct a navigation demo with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, but it’s ultimately meant to be a “pathfinder” that will help the Artemis program’s Gateway spacecraft safely approach the Moon.

This deal isn’t surprising given the current NASA administration’s privatization efforts. At the same time, it appears to be a logical fit. Rocket Lab’s speciality is launching rockets quickly and on a relatively low budget, and it appear to be delivering — it’ll blast off roughly a year from this writing with a cost just under $10 million, or less than the $13.7 million NASA is paying to create and run CAPSTONE. If everything goes well, this could lead to more high-profile team-ups between NASA and Rocket Lab.

Virgin Orbit is a spinoff of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and is dedicated to low-cost smallsat projects. This new Virgin Orbit endeavor was reportedly inspired by NASA’s recent InSight mission, which successfully sent two cubesats to Mars. Now, the company believes it can send its own similar spacecraft (as light as 110 pounds) into deep space using its LauncherOne rocket.

The potential for small satellites stretches far beyond LEO – and whoever said Virgin’s orbit was limited to the Earth?

We’re above and beyond excited to announce our first mission to the Red Planet. https://t.co/bxiV1RuIAs

— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) October 9, 2019

Once the cubesats reach the planet, they may take photos, study the atmosphere or look for water. Eventually, Virgin Orbit may examine the moons of Mars, Venus and “maybe a couple of the asteroids in the asteroid belt,” Will Pomerantz, the vice president of special projects at Virgin Orbit, told The Verge.

Virgin Orbit will have to complete its LauncherOne rocket first. The 70-foot-long rocket will be dropped from Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 carrier, dubbed “Cosmic Girl.” The rocket will then blast off from mid-air. LauncherOne has completed ‘captive carry’ and drop tests, but it has yet to take its first test flight. The success of these Mars-based cubesat missions will likely depend on LauncherOne.

The 16 chosen projects are:

• Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat (SPARCS) from Arizona State University. It will monitor the solar flares and activities of red dwarfs to assess the habitability of their planets.
• BeaverCube from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was designed so that high school students can learn to design CubeSats and study the Earth’s climate by measuring cloud properties, as well as monitoring the temperature and color of the ocean.
• SigNals of Opportunity P-band Investigation (SNoOPI) from Purdue University. It will measure snow and soil moisture for food security and water resources management.
• Daily Atmospheric Ionospheric Limb Imager Mission (DAILI) from The Aerospace Corporation. This one will study wave propagation and transport processes in the lower thermosphere.
• CatSat from the University of Arizona. This project will deploy a one-meter inflatable antenna that can transmit HD video in real time.
• Compact Total Irradiance Monitor Flight Demonstration (CTIM FD) from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The instrument will measure solar irradiance and figure out how it changes our climate.
• CubeSat Inner Radiation Belt Experiment (CIRBE) from the University of Colorado at Boulder. This mission was designed to determine the source, intensity and other details of the electrons in the inner Van Allen radiation belts.
• Drag De-Orbit Device CubeSat (D3) from the University of Florida, Gainesville. This is a demo mission to validate a new Low-Earth Orbit drag modulating device for future spacecraft.
• Hyperspectral Thermal Imager (HyTI) from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. It will show how various resolutions of image data can be used to monitor water resources.
• Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE) from University of Wisconsin-Madison. This mission is composed of two satellites that will monitor far-infrared radiation and determine its role in Arctic warming, sea ice loss, ice sheet melt and sea level rise.
• CapSat-1 from Weiss School Florida. It’s an educational mission meant to gather data for the establishment of a STEM program in the institution.
• Bouchet Low-Earth Alpha/Beta Space Telescope (BLAST) from Yale University. It will map the distribution of galactic cosmic radiation across the night sky, which could tell us more about the origin of the universe.
• Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) from NASA Ames Research Center. It will demonstrate deployable composite boom and solar sail technologies for future deep-space missions.
• BurstCube from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It’s expected to provide more information and gather info on the end stages of stellar evolution.
• Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit Satellite to Study Radiation Belt Dynamics (GTOSat) from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It will gather data to boost our understanding of acceleration and of the loss of relativistic electrons in the Earth’s outer radiation belt.
• Plasma Enhancement in The Ionosphere-Thermosphere Satellite (petitSat) from NASA Ames Research Center. It will keep an eye on large plasma enhancements that can interfere with radio waves used for communication and navigation.

These projects will fly aboard not just flights headed to the ISS, as well as missions led by NASA, but also aboard launches led by other government agencies and even commercial organizations.