NASA and SpaceX to send telescope into space with Falcon Heavy rocket - contract price is beyond reasonable

The space agency NASA together with the company SpaceX will send into space a new observatory Roman Space Telescope.

What we know

The launch will take place in October 2026. This will be NASA's sixth great observatory in space, and it will be superior in some respects to the James Webb Telescope, which recently began transmitting photos to Earth.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will have a mirror 2.4 m wide. The field of view will be a hundred times larger than that of the Hubble telescope. The new development will allow photography at 288 MP resolution thanks to a multispectral infrared camera created by Lockheed Martin.

The cost of the contract is $255 million, which raises many questions. For better understanding, in 2024 Falcon Heavy will participate in the Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter and the GOES-Usatellite launch. The total value of the two similar contracts is approximately $330 million ($178 million and $152.5 million, respectively).

As for the telescope itself Roman Space Telescope, it will follow the path of "James Webb" and will be put to the Lagrange point L2 at a distance of 1.5 million km from our planet. The telescope will search for dark energy and take direct photos of exoplanets. The cost of the entire project is $4.3 billion.

Source: Space News