Spaceflight Daily Report, Sunday 30th August 2026

Image credit: NASA

Launch of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1126 UTC, or 0726 local time (EDT). This was carrying NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. It was the 13th flight of the Falcon Heavy. The rocket's two side boosters were B1104 and B1072, on their first and third flights respectively, which both performed boostback burns after separation and landed successfully at Landing Zones 40 and 2 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The expendable central booster was B1105, on its first and only flight. [Source: SpaceX]

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named after NASA's first chief astronomer and the driving voice behind many of NASA's space observatories, who passed away in 2018. Roman's primary instrument is the Wide Field Instrument, which will take infrared photographs at a similar resolution to the Hubble Space Telescope but with a field of view a hundred times wider, complementing the James Webb Space Telescope's ability to take extremely high resolution images of a very small patch of sky. It will perform surveys of the sky that are expected to discover tens of thousands of exoplanets and provide better constraints for theories of dark matter and dark energy. A secondary instrument called the Coronagraph Instrument will also attempt to take direct images of exoplanets, as opposed to detecting them via the influence they have on their host stars. Roman is now on its way to the Earth-Sun L2 point, an optimal location for astronomy. The primary mission is aiming to operate for five years, and the telescope has enough fuel to remain stable at L2 for at least a further five years after that. It also has the necessary hardware for an optional refuelling mission in the future. [Source: NASA]

SpaceX Crew-13 Delay

The SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station, originally due to launch on 12th September, has been delayed. Routine pre-flight checks revealed an oxidizer leak in the propulsion system of Crew Dragon Grace, which previously flew on Axiom Mission 4. NASA and SpaceX have not yet announced a new launch date. [Source: NASA]