RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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The hours are counting down to the launch of NASA's newest flagship orbital observatory. The spacecraft recently got its last glimpse of terrestrial light before being encapsulated in its rocket's protective payload fairing last week and is imminently bound for liftoff.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is NASA's next-generation research satellite , and it's currently slated to launch on Sunday (Aug. 30). Roman will lift off atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:27 a.m. EDT (1127 GMT) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The scope will then head to sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 (L2), an orbital sweet spot about 930,000 million miles (1.5 million km) away that will park the spacecraft on the side of Earth opposite the sun.
Roman's upcoming launch will cap nearly two decades and $4 billion of development and usher in a new wave of astronomical research into dark matter and dark energy , exoplanet discoveries and the ability to capture visible-to-near-infrared images of the universe that are 50 times wider than the field of view on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). But last year, as Roman's assembly and testing neared completion, President Trump's leaked budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 (FY26) stoked fears that the entire mission could be canceled.
In April 2025, reporting about initial "passback" budget documents outlined a proposal for the largest cut in NASA's history — a 24% overall reduction in funding, with a 50% loss to science programs. The document detailed continued support for missions like Hubble and JWST but allocated "no funding … for other telescopes." The news shocked scientists and engineers across NASA missions, who were suddenly dealt a dose of uncertainty as their job security teetered in political limbo.
For Roman's team, the prospect of abandoning the telescope just before the finish line hit hard. Lisa, an engineer who worked on Roman's team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and wished to be identified by an alias, was left confounded at the time. "We're 95% there. If it gets canceled, it would be really ridiculous, and I don't know how I would handle it," she told Space.com in an interview. "This is basically my life's work."
Others working on Roman took the news in stride. Jamie Dunn has worked at Goddard since 1991. He served as Roman's project manager from 2018 until he was appointed director of the center this past June. During a question-and-answer session with a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Aug. 10 — part of a congressionally mandated assessment prompted in part by reporting from Space.com about accelerated facility closures and consolidations at Goddard last year — Dunn described a calmer reaction to Roman's potential cancellation.
"Out of the eight years I [worked on Roman]," he told the committee, "we were zeroed out in the president's budget … in at least half of them. Not to be casual about it, but that happens."
When the president's official "skinny budget" proposal was published a few weeks after the April leak last year, Roman's prospects shifted from dire to just worrisome. Instead of cancelling the mission outright, the administration's budget request allocated just $156.6 million to Roman's continued development in FY26 — less than half of what the project received in FY25.
Scientists working on the Roman Space Telescope. (Image credit: NASA/Sophia Roberts)
Goddard personnel began working around the clock at a time when government agencies, including NASA, were initiating reductions in force and encouraging civil servants to accept a " deferred resignation " option. Of three skilled technicians working in one department of Roman's team, two left, according to Lisa, which put further strain on the telescope's ongoing qualification testing at the time.
"We're pushing forward to get as far as we can while we have our current funding, and we'll see what happens," Lisa told Space.com last summer. "That amount of funding obviously will make it impossible, in my opinion, to keep schedule, because we can't keep running two shifts with half the people."
On the management side, Dunn tried to keep his team from getting distracted by politics. "Sometimes you've just got to keep coloring," he told the National Academies committee. "We kept working, and I [told the Roman team that] the best thing we can do is deliver on our commitments. And if delivering on our commitments isn't good enough, then what else can we do?"
Lisa said that Roman's mission leadership mitigated the team's panic. "[They] actually did a really good job of telling us, 'We're just going to proceed as we were before … Just focus on the work,' and, 'The best way to make sure we don't get cut is to continue delivering and continue to stay on schedule,'" she said.
Many of the engineers and technicians working on Roman "just put on blinders, put our heads down and kept working," Lisa said. "People were giving up their weekends, and at the same time, there was this compartmentalized knowledge that it could all get cut."
Rather than merely stay on schedule, though, the Roman mission team was pushed to accelerate it. Congress ultimately rejected the steep cuts to NASA in the president's budget request and restored the agency's funding to the previous year's levels. Not wanting to go through a repeat of uncertainty for FY27, Roman mission management began eyeing faster routes to the launch pad.
"They just kept pulling it earlier and earlier, because I think they were pushing to get it off the ground and in space before it could get cut," Lisa said. Eventually, Roman's target launch date moved up to September, and then to the end of August "so that it could happen within this fiscal year."
"In order to stay on schedule at the time, the Roman teams were running two shifts every day and working every Saturday, sometimes on Sundays," Lisa said. The strain took a toll on morale, but their hard work paid of...
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