Pew Research Center surveyed Americans about their views on space exploration and the space business including their views on private space companies:

About two-in-ten Americans say they have heard or read a lot about private space companies developing space exploration capabilities, while 54% say they have heard a little about this and 24% say they have heard nothing at all. The share of Americans who have heard at least a little about private space companies’ efforts is up 13 percentage points since 2018. Men and those with higher levels of education are particularly likely to say they are familiar with private space companies.

Americans most familiar with private companies’ space efforts are especially positive in their evaluations of the job they are doing. Large majorities of those who have heard a lot about private space companies say they are doing a mostly good job building reliable spacecraft and rockets, as well as making important contributions to space exploration.

For example, among those who say they have heard a lot about private space companies, 72% say they are doing a mostly good job making important contributions to space exploration, while 12% say they are doing a mostly bad job and 16% are not sure.

For most Americans that view is likely dominated by SpaceX, and the space tourism activities of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin. Rocket Lab is starting to get much deserved attention thanks to launches out of Wallops and some very high profile NASA missions - but there’s still a long way to go and a lot of work in this field that people are unaware of.

Blue Origin encountered an issue during recent BE-4 testing according to Michael Sheetz:

During a firing on June 30 at a West Texas facility of Jeff Bezos’ space company, a BE-4 engine detonated about 10 seconds into the test, according to several people familiar with the matter. Those people described having seen video of a dramatic explosion that destroyed the engine and heavily damaged the test stand infrastructure.

ULA is pushing back on the notion that this will have an impact on Vulcan:

“The BE-4 testing issue is not expected to impact our plans for the Vulcan Cert-1 mission.” The company noted that the engines for Cert-1 “successfully passed acceptance testing” and are qualified to launch.

It’s difficult to know just how serious this is without more information about the failure and the intent of the testing but hopefully Blue Origin and ULA will get both the BE-4 and the Vulcan sorted soon.

Update: Tory Bruno tweeted some good news.