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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 astrophysi...

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 Telesco...