First - make combat missions, well, about combat, not about scanning for artifacts or scouting chassis's of 5 identical miners or one big mob, twice, and then killing him. I mean from my combat missions I expect combat and the last one thing I want to do is go and hunt for artifacts (which I just can't stand as game mechanic). Maybe there should be another category of missions for those hybrids? Something like "discovery", or "scouting" or "misc".

My other suggestion is the obvious one - more variety. You can't imagine how boring it gets when you have to keep griding 3 missions over and over, with zero variety. Maybe at least make the sites more random? Or amount of npcs/type more random? Well, something because as it is 3 missions gets old really quick. I understand that there is much more challenge in designing missions here since you do not just warp to random place in space, but I can see how it will make a lot of people run for the hills.