Welcome to The OuterSpark, here I make sense of the space industry one week at a time: what's being built, who's building it, and how you get in!
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This morning at 12:26 UK time, a Falcon Heavy lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying a $4.3bn telescope the size of a tour bus, weighing about as much as a T-Rex.
Its story is stranger than the science, and the science is very good.
What is the Roman Space Telescope?
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named after NASA's first chief astronomer, the woman who fought the political battles that got Hubble built.
Fig. Nancy Grace Roman (May 16, 1925 – December 25, 2018) was an American astronomer who made important contributions to stellar classifications and stellar motions. She was thefirst female executive at NASA. Image Source: Wikipedia
Naming a telescope after the person who got the funding through rather than the person who designed the optics is unusually honest, and you'll see why that matters in a minute.
Roman has a 2.4 metre mirror. Identical in size to Hubble's. That's the bit that confuses people, because if the mirror is the same, what's the point?
Fig. Roman Space Telescope. Image Source: NASA
rea of sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble does, at the same sharpness. Nicky Fox at NASA put it well: Hubble and Webb peer through a keyhole at the universe, and Roman kicks the door down.
That difference changes what kind of question you can ask. Hubble and Webb are for looking hard at one thing. Roman is for looking at everything, repeatedly, and finding the things nobody knew to point at. It will take thousands of images a day and could measure light from a billion galaxies over its lifetime.
Fig. Roman Telescope’s field of view compared to Hubble. Image Source: ESA
Three jobs in particular:
Dark energy. Something is making the universe expand faster over time and nobody knows what. Roman will map how galaxies have spread out across cosmic history precisely enough to test whether our explanations hold.
Exoplanets by census. Rather than studying individual planets, Roman will count them, building the first proper statistical picture of how many planets exist and of what kind. It can also block out a star's light to photograph planets directly.
Whatever changes. Surveying the same patches repeatedly means catching things that appear and vanish: exploding stars, flares, objects moving through our own solar system.
It's heading to a spot about 930,000 miles away, on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun, where it can stay cold and stare without interruption.
The part that isn’t in the press release
That 2.4 metre mirror was a gift! In 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office, the US agency that runs spy satellites, told NASA it had two Hubble-class telescope assemblies sitting in storage that it no longer needed. Surplus hardware, built for looking down at Earth, handed over to an agency that wanted to look up.
Fig. The National Reconnaissance Office logo.
Sit with that for a second. A spy agency had spare telescopes as good as Hubble, gathering dust, and nobody outside knew.
Roman is built around one of them. Which is also why its mirror is exactly Hubble-sized and yet the mission looks nothing like Hubble. The team had a mirror and designed a different instrument around it.
And then it nearly didn't happen anyway. The mission has been proposed for cancellation more than once in budget cycles, and survived because people fought for it, in committees, for years. A telescope named after the woman who fought Hubble's political battles very nearly lost its own.
Here's my read. Last week I wrote that the bottleneck in this industry is almost never the technology. Roman is the clearest example I know. The optics existed already, in a warehouse. The hard part, the part that took fourteen years, was institutional: getting agencies to talk, surviving budget rounds, keeping enough people convinced.
If you want a career lesson from a $4.3bn telescope, it's that the mirror was the easy bit.
Make sure to grab my free copy of the UK Space Playbook whic is a complete map of the UK space economy showing how the money flows, who the players are, and how you get in!
Other Space News From This Week 💡
Massive movements in space tech in China. Shanghai Spacecom/Yuanxin Satellite ("SpaceSail") closes a $1.94B Series B, the largest single funding round yet for a Starlink rival, and 100% domestic Chinese capital. Read.
Another unicorn on the back of space-based data and compute. Starcloud raises $250M Series A extension at $2.3B valuation, backed by Nvidia, Cisco Investments, and others, more than doubling its valuation just 5 months after its March raise. Read.
Upcoming Deadlines & Events
If you're working on getting into space, or building something in it, here are some upcoming deadlines that you should know of:
Deadlines
UK: UK Space Agency C-LEO Call 3, Stage One closes midday Monday 7 September. £42m for satellite comms tech.
Europe: ESA Future Navigation Demonstrators, open call. Ideas in before 30 September for the next selection round.
US: NSF America's Seed Fund, full proposals 4 November. You need an invited Project Pitch first, which takes one to two months, so pitch now.
US: NASA SBIR/STTR, rolling topic batches through to September 2027. Sign up for alerts.
India: IN-SPACe Seed Fund (up to ₹1 crore) and Technology Adoption Fund. Open in batches, so register on the portal and watch.
Events
Space for Inspiration (ESA): 1 to 2 September, Copenhagen
UK Earth Observation Conference : 15 to 17 September, University of Warwick
UK Space Power Conference: 23 and 24 September, IET Savoy Place, London
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Till next time!
