Tense, public squabbles between SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and NASA have stirred the space industry, but behind the scenes, space science has continued business as (almost) normal.

NASA and SpaceX successfully launched their SPHEREx and PUNCH missions into orbit Tuesday night from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, to "collect" data on the sun and millions of galaxies.

Launching on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, SPHEREx will map 450 million galaxies and could help unravel what happened after the Big Bang, while PUNCH will make observations of the sun’s outer atmosphere and learn how the mass and energy there become solar wind.