NASA's Roman telescope cleared its flight readiness review Aug 21. Will it lift off from Kennedy Space Center on Aug 30?

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30, 2026, from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, matching the timeline set after its flight readiness review cleared on August 21. The telescope separated from the rocket's upper stage roughly 31 minutes after liftoff and is now on a trajectory toward the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2, about 1 million miles from Earth.

The launch was the 13th flight of the Falcon Heavy and the rocket's third NASA mission, following the Psyche and Europa Clipper launches. Roman is designed to study dark energy and dark matter and to conduct a wide survey of planetary systems, extending the observational reach of the Hubble and James Webb telescopes with a much larger field of view.

Predict Six's community had set the probability of an on-time launch at 77 percent following the successful readiness review, reflecting confidence that a clean review would translate into a clean launch. That expectation held: the mission proceeded on schedule with no reported delays during the countdown.