The past five years have seen a series of new spacecraft launched toward the goal of investigating the properties and mechanisms of the space environment. The missions – SDO, STEREO, Hinode, AIM, THEMIS, TWINS, IBEX, and the contributed instrument on the USAF C/NOFS mission – have yielded insights and information that are not only of research value, but provide a solid basis for the improvement of space situational awareness. These missions have provided a range of data with unprecedented resolution, spatial, temporal, and thermal, across a wide range of scales. The next five years should see the launch of two major strategic missions –RBSP and MMS – along with the Small Explorer, IRIS. These missions, and the distributed systems observatory they create in combination, are significant assets allowing our scientific community to achieve major advances in understanding and predicting the space environment.