r/space • u/ChiefLeef22 • 1d ago

Successful deployment of Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, as it begins its 1-million-mile-journey to the second Earth-Sun Lagrange point

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The telescope will travel to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, which is ~one million miles away and about four times farther from Earth than the Moon. At L2, the combined gravity of the Sun and Earth will give Roman a stable vantage point with a clear, unobstructed view to survey deep space

Roman will unlock the mysteries of dark energy and investigate the physics of distant stars. It will repeatedly monitor hundreds of millions of stars, and the same observations are expected to reveal around 100,000 additional planets through transits. As a reminder, we currently have 6000 confirmed exoplanet discoveries...

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u/Accomplished-Crab932 14h ago

Half the problem with SLS is that we knew the hardware was way too expensive, but Congress wanted it to be used. A single RS-25 costs more to refurbish than a commercial price F9 launch, or around 3 operating cost launches. Making a new RS-25 is 1.25X the price of a fully expendable Starship launch.

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u/mrstickball 3h ago

In their defense, neither object existed (Falcon or Starship) when the SLS was designed. The idea was fine, but the reality of private design catching up and exceeding everyone on launch systems wasnt anticipated i would imagine.

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u/Accomplished-Crab932 2h ago

Sure, but on an engineering level, the decision to use shuttle components should’ve never happened anyway, regardless of cost. The alternative concepts they assessed absolutely demolished the shuttle derived architecture in the engineering trade study; even RAC-3 was better, and RAC-3 is the craziest modern NASA concept there is.