WASHINGTON – NASA has selected SpaceX to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on a Heavy Falcon, but at a significantly higher price than previous agency contracts.
NASA announced on July 19 that it had awarded a contract to SpaceX to launch Roman on the company’s Falcon Heavy rocket in October 2026 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is valued at $ 255 million for launch and other mission-related costs.
Roman is the next major astrophysics mission, or insignia, after the James Webb Space Telescope. The spacecraft has a 2.4-meter primary mirror, donated to NASA a decade ago by the National Reconnaissance Office, with a wide-field instrument and a coronograph to conduct research in cosmology, exoplanets, and general astrophysics. .
The spacecraft, with a mass of about 4,200 kilograms, will operate from the L-2 Lagrange point Earth-sun, a region of space about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth in the direction away from the sun. This is the same location where JWST and several other astrophysics missions operate.
The value of the launch contract is much greater than previous NASA awards for Falcon Heavy missions. NASA awarded SpaceX a contract a year ago for the launch of Falcon Heavy from the 2024 Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter valued at $ 178 million. A September 2021 contract for the Falcon Heavy launch of the GOES-U weather satellite, also in 2024, is worth $ 152.5 million.
SpaceX is offering the Falcon Heavy at a list price of $ 97 million. The company raised that price earlier this year from $ 90 million, citing “excessive levels of inflation.”
SpaceX may not have had competition for the Roman launch. Tory Bruno, executive director of United Launch Alliance, tweeted in February that his company was not bidding for the launch. Vulcan Centaur of his company has not yet made its first launch. Blue Origin’s New Glenn is also set to launch.
Roman is a key mission for NASA not only for science but also for program management. Formerly called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), the mission is the flagship top-priority mission of the 2010 decennial astrophysics survey. The most recent ten-year survey, published in November 2021, concluded that Roman being powerful and necessary to achieve the “scientific goals” set out in the previous survey.
Despite initial challenges and several budget proposals from the agency that sought to end the mission, Roman has continued to develop. Last year, however, the mission suffered a seven-month launch delay and a $ 382 million cost increase that the agency blamed for the effects of the pandemic. The mission now has a total life cycle cost of $ 4.32 billion.
An assessment by the Government’s Office of Responsibility of NASA’s major programs released in June warned of the potential for further delays in Roman, citing problems with the spacecraft’s main mirror assembly and restriction release actuators. .
Keeping Roman on schedule and within budget is critical, agency officials said, to build confidence that it can handle large scientific missions after significant excess costs and schedules with JWST. Only then, they argue, can NASA pursue large space telescopes like those backed by the latest 10-year astrophysics survey, such as a six-meter space telescope for observations at optical, ultraviolet, and infrared wavelengths.
“Number one on the priority list is to make sure the Roman Space Telescope is delivered within our cost and schedule commitments,” Paul Hertz, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in June.
“Unless NASA can prove that we have learned lessons from the mistakes that were made in the management of the James Webb space telescope program and we can show that we can apply those lessons to another very expensive and very difficult large observatory, like Nancy Grace. Roman space telescope, no one will take us seriously, “he argued.