Zitat NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman@NASAAdmin The President of the United States called into the NASA press conference after the historic Roman Telescope launch.
There is a reason nearly 70% of Americans support NASA's return to the Moon, compared with just 35% during the Kennedy era. The world’s most accomplished space agency, backed by @POTUS, bipartisan support in Congress, and an extraordinary workforce, can absolutely achieve the near impossible.
We are returning astronauts to the Moon, building the base, getting underway on nuclear power in space, with many more exciting missions like Roman to follow! 4:58 PM · Aug 30, 2026
Zitat Jared Isaacman: The President of the United Sates would like to address you and congratulate everyone on this mission. You're live, Mr. President!
DT: OK - I just want to thank everybody and congratulate you . Boy, it looked beautiful on television. I just called Jared to find out: is there anything negative that I shoiuld know about - like, it will never be able to return? Little things like that. He said: no, it's looking great, it ouldn't be better, and it was another great successful launch. Jared's doing a fantastic job. YOU are doing a fantastic job. And I'm supplying you all that money.
JI: Mr. President, you got a lot of smiling people in the room right now that are very happy to hear those words. And we will put it to excellent use.
DT: Well, keep it up. We're back. You know, when I looked originally, when I got involved the first term, my first month, I went to look at a couple of your locations. And I said - you probably heard it the other day when we had that wonderful news conference - : grass was growing through the cracks in the runways, and there were a lot of cracks. And I looked - the place was closed - and it's Florida in this case - and it was just literally closed. And now, again, like we are with the country itself: we're the hottest there is, we're the hottest in space, and we've got the hottest country anywhere in the world. So let's keep it all going. You're a big part of it. Let's keep it all going.
PS.
Zitat Tiago Nugent, Composer@TiagoNugent my favorite thing about Lagrange points is that Euler discovered them first but he has so much bullshit named after him they gave it to Lagrange 1:46 PM · Aug 30, 2026
Joseph Louis Lagrange hat alle 5 der nach ihm benannten Punkte 1772 im zweiten Kapitel des "Essai sur le probléme de trois corps" beschrieben. Leonard Euler hat L1, L2 und L3 1765 in "De motu rectilineo trium corporum se mutuo attrahentium" beschrieben. (Zu beachten dabei: L1-3 sind die Punkte, die fluchtend auf der Verbindungslinie der beiden sich umkreisenden Himmelskörper liegen; L4 und L5 sind die, die der Umlaufbahn eines der beiden "voraus" und "hinterher" laufen.) Hier nachzulesen: http://eulerarchive.maa.org//docs/originals/E327.pdf
Eine freihändige Zusammenfassung des Aufsatzes und eine Auflösung der bescheidenen Gleichungen an der Wandtafel wäre ein hübscher Eignungstest für angehende Journalisten wie Politiker. Ließe sich netterweise rein mit Kreide und ohne Powerpoint umsetzen.
Rechnen müßt ihr und nicht dösen wollt ihr eine Gleichung lösen. Aus 3x - x = 8 wird zwei mal 2 = 8 gemacht. indem man x rasch subtrahiert von 3 mal x. Habt ihr's kapiert? Nun dividiert man beide Seiten durch die 2. Wer will bestreiten daß 2x durch 2 links x ergibt? Nun geht es weiter, wenn's beliebt, mit 8 durch 2. Der letzte Vers heißt x = 4. Es stimmt. Das wär's!
- Boy Lornsen
"Les hommes seront toujours fous; et ceux qui croient les guérir sont les plus fous de la bande." - Voltaire
Zitat Why it matters that President Trump just dialed into a NASA news conference | With just one more major mission upcoming, NASA’s science programs need a boost. | Eric Berger – 30. Aug. 2026 19:40
As is standard procedure for major NASA missions, the US space agency held a post-launch news conference on Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to provide information about how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was faring during its initial maneuvers.
What was not standard, however, is what happened in the middle of the news conference. A little less than half an hour in, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at his mobile phone, and then stood up and walked away from the dais where he had been seated behind a table along with other NASA officials. He briefly left the room.
Isaacman returned about a minute later, phone in hand, apologizing for interrupting NASA’s chief of science, Nicky Fox, as she was speaking about the mission. “The President of the United States of America would like to address and congratulate everyone on this mission,” Isaacman said, returning to his seat.
In an unusual moment, Trump then spoke through Isaacman’s phone to the assembled reporters and NASA officials. “I just want to thank everybody, and congratulate you. Boy, it looked beautiful on television,” Trump said of the Roman space telescope launch. “Jared is doing a fantastic job, you are doing a fantastic job, and I’m supplying you all that money.”
So what to make of this? Presidents, historically, do not call into a NASA news conference. In truth, presidents do not spend much time thinking about space in general, or NASA in particular. This is changing with the increasing importance of space from a military standpoint, but for most presidents civil space lies fairly low on the priority list. Presidents call astronauts when they’re orbiting the Moon; they don’t dial into post-launch news conferences.
But Trump is clearly having a NASA moment. On Friday he spent several hours at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he awarded the crew of Artemis II the Congressional Space Medal of Honor and then announced plans for a United States Space Academy. Then, over the weekend, he became enraptured by the prospect of launching the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA’s next great space-based observatory.
At every turn Trump has offered praise for Isaacman, a businessman and private astronaut who has been seeking to reform NASA for the modern era of spaceflight. The warm relationship is all the more surprising because it was only a little more than a year ago that Trump pulled Isaacman’s nomination to lead NASA, citing the lack of “complete alignment” with the America First agenda. Isaacman, a political moderate who leans Republican, had donated to some Democratic candidates in the past.
But late last year Trump had a change of heart and reinstated his nomination.
“With Jared, I have to tell you, everybody wanted him,” Trump said Friday, in Houston. “I got a lot of calls from Republicans and Democrats, something that doesn’t happen very often, and the people just said, “He’s just the best.’ There was no competition. And he’s turned out to be better than we even thought possible, right? Even better. So we’re lucky to have Jared.”
Isaacman has spent a lot of the last 12 months developing political relationships with people in the White House and Congress, on both sides of the aisle. In public statements he has broadly supported the Trump White House. But perhaps most importantly he has delivered wins for an Administration that has been swamped by a series of self-owns, including a deeply unpopular war in Iran, inflation, multiple scandals, and other setbacks. With NASA, Trump has been able to bask in the glow of the wildly successful Artemis II mission and now the launch of the Roman space telescope.
The reality is a little more nuanced. Trump likely does not comb through his budget requests line-by-line, especially for a civil space agency. Rather the cuts sought in fiscal year 2026 and 2027 (which have been, or will be largely repudiated by Congress) in the administration’s budget were driven by Trump’s head of the White House Office of Management and Budget leader Russ Vought, who has been waging a war on US government funding of science—with Trump’s backing.
Although he was certainly responsible for the cuts, it’s unclear how much Trump was interested in their details when they were proposed. But now, at least on a temporary basis, NASA has caught Trump’s interest. Sources said Isaacman has spent a lot of time with the President over the last three days, making the case for future science missions as well as the Artemis Program.
The question is whether this interest will be reflected in the budget request for fiscal year 2028, which is now in the initial stages of preparation. Will Trump, who frequently changes his mind on issues, stay invested in NASA?
NASA’s science programs could use some help. The agency has one more major science mission coming up, the launch of Dragonfly to Titan in 2028. After that the science cupboard looks more threadbare, and NASA could use some major new mission starts. And of course the race back to the Moon continues to heat up with China. If the United States is serious about landing humans there before the end of this decade the space agency could use more resources to make that a reality.
Zitat With its coronagraph and WFI, the telescope is designed to make groundbreaking strides in the fields of dark matter and dark energy, exoplanet discoveries, and will be capable of capturing views 100 times wider than those of its Hubble predecessor.
"The smallest Roman images will be a billion pixels," Dominic Benford, progam scientist for the Roman Space Telescope, said during live commentary. "When we take a billion-pixel image, there isn't a screen on Earth large enough to display all the pixels."
The coronagraph works by blocking out the light of distant stars in such a way that scientists can examine minute details around those stars — meaning they can map out exoplanets orbiting in the systems. Once active, Roman's Wide Field Instrument (WFI) will capture more than a terabyte of data daily; its largest survey will take over a year to complete and is expected to fill more than half a million 4K TVs.
How big will the largest Roman image be?
"A trillion pixels," Benford said. ... Now, the telescope is headed to sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 (L2), a relatively stationary orbital location beyond the orbit of the moon that allows the spacecraft to remain persistently on Earth's night side, with the sun on the opposite side of the planet. The locale places the sun to Roman's backside and points its sensitive instruments away from the intrusion of light reflected off the Earth and moon.
Roman's journey to L2 will take about 90 days. The first 40 or so of those days will be spent turning on the telescope's instruments and performing status checks as the spacecraft slowly configures itself for operation. Science commissioning will begin after about 45 days, its completion corresponding with when Roman arrives at L2.
Zitat Engineers spent the better part of a decade assembling the observatory around a 7.9-foot-diameter (2.4-meter) telescope donated to NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government’s spy satellite agency. The telescope’s primary mirror is the same size as that of Hubble.
NASA took possession of two NRO spy telescopes in 2012, and scientists soon earmarked one of them for the mission that became Roman. The agency hasn’t identified a use for the second telescope. The NRO declared the telescopes surplus after the cancellation of one of its surveillance satellite programs.
The sudden availability of an off-the-shelf telescope led to a redesign of WFIRST. The observatory—still on the drawing board at the time—essentially doubled in size to accommodate the telescope, improving its vision while adding to its cost. Ground teams also had to reconfigure the mirror to change its “optical prescription” and accommodate colder operating temperatures.
Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, calls Roman the Swiss Army Knife of telescopes. It will survey 12 percent of the sky, and while that may not sound like a lot, it is far more than the 0.1 percent observed by Hubble over its 36 years in orbit.
“One month of Roman observations could survey our own Milky Way, resulting in the detection of up to half the stars in our own galaxy,” McEnery said. “This would, itself, represent a catalog of astronomical objects much larger than any in existence today.
“Our main survey will take over a year, and it will be really huge,” she said. “We would need over half a million 4K TVs to fully display the single Roman image from our largest survey. To understand the scale, these TVs would cover 45 Manhattan city blocks, or fully cover El Capitan in Yosemite National Park.” ... A second instrument on Roman, called a coronagraph, will allow astronomers to directly image planets orbiting faraway stars in our own galaxy. The coronagraph works by blocking the bright light from stars, using masks and large-format self-flexing mirrors to detect planets 100 million times fainter than their hosts. NASA says the coronagraph on Roman, with internal mirrors capable of adjusting their prescription on the fly, is 100 to 1,000 times more sensitive than previous coronagraphs on Webb and Hubble.
This part of Roman’s toolkit will allow astronomers to study the sizes, atmospheres, and structures of more kinds of exoplanets than possible today. The coronagraph’s innovations will inform the design of future instruments that could expand the reach of direct imaging to include rocky planets in the habitable zones of their stars.
Zitat Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope@NASARoman Success! Roman’s planned mid-course correction burn went as expected, ensuring that we are on track for our orbit around the second Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth. From science.nasa.gov 11:10 PM · Aug 31, 2026
Zitat NASA’s Roman Completes First Mid-Course Correction Burn
At 12:02 p.m. EDT, Roman began an approximately 3-minute mid-course correction burn to adjust its trajectory toward its final orbit.
It’s the first of two planned orbit adjustments to keep Roman on course for the second Lagrange point, L2. The other, if needed, is planned for later this week, and Roman’s orbital insertion will take place approximately 100 days post-launch. Once in orbit around L2, Roman will only require periodic station-keeping burns roughly every 28 days.
Trace Roman’s path here, and follow along with the blog for further updates.
Zitat September 1, 2026 8:59 AM | NASA Roman Space Telescope’s Antenna, ‘Visor’ Deployed
Roman’s antenna and visor-like sunshade have successfully deployed.
Roman will downlink the highest data volume of any NASA astrophysics mission so far via its high-gain antenna, which measures 5.6 feet wide yet only weighs 24 pounds. It’s made of a carbon composite material that weighs very little but will still withstand the spacecraft’s wide temperature fluctuations. Its large size will help Roman send radio signals across a million miles of intervening space to Earth.
The deployable aperture cover, which is a large sunshade designed to keep unwanted light out of the telescope, was released next. It deployed via three booms that were triggered electronically to spring upward. It lasted about 8 minutes and was successfully completed at 6:05 a.m. EDT on Sept. 1.
Roman’s next major milestone is the Coronagraph Instrument activation. In a couple of weeks, the Wide Field Instrument will power on. Both instruments will run through a series of calibrations and tests throughout the rest of Roman’s three-month commissioning period. NASA anticipates releasing Roman’s first images by early 2027.
September 1, 2026 9:06 AM | NASA Roman’s Planet Imager Has Powered On
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has successfully activated the mission’s Coronagraph Instrument, which will block starlight to view planets and dusty disks around nearby stars. Now the instrument will undergo a monthslong series of calibrations and tests prior to beginning full science operations.
The coronagraph power-on began at 7:27 a.m. EDT and completed at 8:22 a.m. on Sept. 1.
The Roman Coronagraph is a system of optics, masks, self-flexing mirrors, and sensors designed to demonstrate the most advanced technologies ever flown in space for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from stars and make it possible for scientists to see the faint reflected light from planets in orbit around them.
Zitat Joe Hansen@joehansen 🚨 SpaceX told the FCC Flight 14 is going to orbit • Filing covers an orbital second stage from Starbase. Window starts Sept 15, 2026 through March 15, 2027 • First 13 flights were a same-day suborbital arc. Ship came home in an hour • About 20 production Starlink V3 birds on board. Flight 13 carried 20 too. Those burned on the way down • Ship splashdown still the Indian Ocean. Tower catch pushed to “a few months” • Booster 21 did the 33-engine static fire. Ship 41 already fired
A comms STA is not a launch date. It is SpaceX writing “orbit” on federal paper for the first time.
If those V3 sats stay up, Starship stops being a test film and starts being a launcher.
That is the line Flight 13 never crossed. 7:49 AM · Sep 2, 2026
Zitat SpaceX has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to fly Starlink terminals during Starship’s fourteenth flight test, and the filing lays out a genuine trip to orbit, something the program has never attempted.
Every Starship flight so far, including Flight 13’s successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean on July 24, has flown a suborbital arc that ends with the ship reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launches. The FCC paperwork describes a mission profile built around an actual orbital insertion instead.
The payload is the other half of the story. Flight 13 carried 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, but because that mission never reached orbit, the satellites reentered along with the ship rather than joining the constellation, something Teslarati covered in detail after SpaceX released footage shot from one of those satellites as it drifted away from Starship in space. Flight 14 is designed to close that gap. If the orbital insertion holds, the roughly 20 V3 satellites onboard would separate into an operational orbit and could eventually go into service, each one rated for about 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity by SpaceX’s own account.
Elon Musk first flagged the orbital attempt during SpaceX’s August 4 earnings call, the company’s first as a public entity following its June IPO under the ticker SPCX. He also floated catching the ship with the Starbase tower on the same flight, an idea he walked back on August 20, saying the catch attempt would more likely come “in a few months,” as Teslarati reported at the time. Flight 14 will instead target a splashdown for the ship in the Indian Ocean, the same recovery method used since Flight 12.
Hardware has been catching up to the ambition. Booster 21 completed a full 33-engine static fire on August 28, and Ship 41 finished its own six-engine test the week before. An airspace briefing circulated to pilots on August 20 listed September 15 as the target date, later than the end of August window Musk mentioned on the earnings call, though SpaceX has not confirmed a launch date publicly and Starship schedules routinely slip while hardware and FAA paperwork line up.
Zitat von Ulrich Elkmann im Beitrag #178Zitat von Ulrich Elkmann im Beitrag "Vorne macht es 'zisch!' und hinten knallt's"Aktuelle Rückmeldung:Zitat Isar Aerospace@isaraerospace Mission ‘Onward and Upward’ will be moved to new launch window. We are standing down from today's launch attempt to address an issue with a pressurization valve...
Kaum wartet man einen Monat geht´s auch schon zum nächsten zweiten Startversuch. Wie ich jetzt gerade erst sehe, ist für Dienstag ein neuer Anlauf für ‘Onward and Upward’ geplant.
Möge die Macht mit ihnen sein...
Zitat Isar Aerospace Calls Off 4 September Spectrum Launch Attempt
German launch services provider Isar Aerospace appears to have scrubbed a planned 4 September attempt to conduct the second flight of its Spectrum rocket. The company called off the attempt several hours after launch-related road closures came into effect.
At 10:39 CEST on 4 September, Nordland Police announced that land and maritime traffic restrictions around the Andøya Spaceport had been activated in connection with what it described as a “planned rocket launch.” The land restriction, which includes road closures, was due to remain in force from midday until midnight. However, at 14:25 CEST, police issued a further update stating that the traffic ban around Andøya Spaceport had been lifted. With the road closure being lifted, no attempt to launch Spectrum will be made today.
Isar Aerospace has yet to publicly comment on the scrub or, for that matter, the attempt itself. The company has also not publicly acknowledged the broader approved launch window, which will remain open until 10 September. Unlike the several previous attempts to conduct Spectrum’s second flight, the company has so far provided no public updates on this latest campaign.
While no official reason has been given, weather may have played a role. Conditions around Andøya had been windy, with observations from nearby Andøya Airport recording winds of around 24 knots. Isar Aerospace has previously postponed Spectrum launch attempts due to unfavourable weather.
Zitat Booster 10@booster_10 After being repeatedly delayed since it's first launch attempt in January it looks like Spectrum Flight 2 may finally happen tomorrow. 10:13 PM · Sep 3, 2026
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