Hours after a NASA mission to unravel the secrets of the universe blasted off on SpaceX’s most powerful rocket, the agency’s chief got a surprise call.
President Donald Trump gatecrashed a NASA press conference after the agency successfully launched a $4.3 billion deep space telescope aboard a SpaceX rocket.
The president called NASA administrator Jared Isaacman and addressed reporters and NASA staff to congratulate them on the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.
“Jared’s doing a fantastic job, you are doing a fantastic job — and I’m supplying you all that money,” Trump said, adding that the launch looked “beautiful on television.”
The Nancy Grace Roman telescope, which has been in development for over a decade, is designed to hunt for dark matter and dark energy, mysterious forces that physicists believe play a vital role in shaping the structure of the universe.
The telescope also features specialist tools that will allow it to block out the light of distant stars to directly view exoplanets, worlds in other solar systems that could have suitable conditions to harbor alien life.
The telescope is on its way to an orbit one million miles from Earth after launching from Cape Canaveral aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.
Calling into a NASA press conference is the latest sign of Trump’s growing interest in the US presence in space.
The president signed an executive order earlier this month targeting an increase in the number of rocket launches to 1,000 a year, and last week announced a US space academy to train new NASA astronauts and engineers.
The creation of the academy will be overseen by Isaacman, the billionaire and former SpaceX astronaut who became NASA administrator in December, and comes as the agency races to return US astronauts to the moon before the end of the decade.
Trump has not always been so supportive of NASA’s scientific missions. The president proposed budget cuts last year that could have led to the Roman space telescope’s cancellation had they not been rejected by Congress.
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