Falcon Heavy Launches NASA's Roman Space Telescope

NASA and SpaceX completed a Launch Readiness Review Aug 28, 2026, declaring the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope go for launch on a Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A. The encapsulated observatory rolled to the pad and was raised vertical Aug 29, and Falcon Heavy lifted off at 7:26 a.m. EDT on Aug 30 as planned. The two side boosters landed back at Cape Canaveral (Landing Zone 2 and Landing Zone 40) roughly 7.5 minutes after liftoff, and Roman separated cleanly from the upper stage at 7:57 a.m. EDT, beginning its transit to the Sun-Earth L2 halo orbit that also hosts the James Webb Space Telescope. Roman carries a 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument covering 100x the sky area of Hubble in a single shot plus a coronagraph, and is expected to survey for dark matter and dark energy, map billions of galaxies, and discover roughly 100,000 new exoplanets. It was the sixth NASA flagship-class science payload to fly on a SpaceX Falcon rocket from Kennedy, after IXPE, Psyche, GOES-U, Europa Clipper, and IMAP.