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Rocket Report: Crypto-funded Heavy Rocket; Falcon 9 was damaged during transportation

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Zoom in / An electronic missile launched the NROL-162 mission on July 13. rocket lab Welcome to Rocket Report 5.04! Be sure and read to the end, because most of this week’s news is about heavy missiles, or at least Suggestion Heavy missiles. Also, there will be no newsletter next week because I will be spending time with my family. But then I’ll be back in the saddle for the rest of the summer and fall, which promises to be full of expensive rocket launches. As always, we welcome Readers’ offers. And if you don’t want to miss any issues, please register using the box below (the form won’t appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small, medium and heavy missiles as well as a glimpse of the next three launches on the calendar. Isar Aerospace departs from French Guiana . The Germany-based startup announced on Thursday. It will conduct commercial and institutional launches from the European Spaceport in French Guiana starting in 2024. In

NASA chooses Falcon Heavy to launch the Roman Space Telescope - SpaceNews

WASHINGTON — NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with Falcon Heavy, but at a much higher price than the agency’s previous contract. NASA announced July 19 that it awarded SpaceX a contract to launch Roman on the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is worth $255 million for launch and other mission-related costs. Roman is the next major astrophysics mission after the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft has a 2.4-meter main mirror, donated to NASA a decade ago by the National Reconnaissance Office, with wide-field instruments and a coronagraph to conduct research in cosmology, exoplanets, and general astrophysics. The spacecraft with a mass of about 4,200 kilograms will operate from the Earth-sun Lagrange L-2 point, a space region about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction away from the sun. It is the same location that JWST and several other astrophysical mission

SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket to launch NASA's Roman Space Telescope

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NASA has selected SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch its next major space telescope, a wide-field observatory that directly complements the new James Webb Space Telescope. Originally known as the Wide Field InfraRed Survey Telescope (WFIRST), NASA recently renamed the mission in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, the basic force behind the Hubble Space Telescope. Fittingly, the basic design of the Roman Space Telescope is reminiscent of Hubble in many ways, due to the fact that the mission existed solely because the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) chose to donate an unused billion-dollar spy satellite – a satellite which is effectively a secret version of Hubble facing Earth. However, thanks to decades of improvements in electronics, electromechanics, and the instrumentation side of spacecraft and space telescopes, the RST will be dramatically more capable than any similar Hubble telescope. And now, after years of battling for survival, the Roman Space Telescope of