SpaceX Sets August 30 Falcon Heavy Launch for NASA’s Roman

SpaceX is targeting Sunday, August 30 at 7:26 a.m. ET for a Falcon Heavy launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with a backup window Monday, August 31 at 7:22 a.m. ET.

The company posted the mission page and countdown timeline on spacex.com/launches/roman. A live webcast is set to start about an hour before liftoff on the site and on SpaceX’s X account. The two first-stage side boosters assigned to the flight are on their first and third missions, after earlier work on GOES-U and Viasat-3 F3.

Roman is a NASA flagship observatory built to study dark energy and dark matter. After reaching Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, it will have an unobstructed view of the sky and a field of view at least 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, enough to map billions of galaxies and hunt exoplanets and black holes.

The August 30 target follows NASA and SpaceX clearing a Flight Readiness Review on August 21 at Kennedy. Teams still have to move the encapsulated observatory to SpaceX’s hangar at pad 39A and mate it to the rocket before rollout.

Falcon Heavy remains the heavy-lift option in a year when Falcon 9 is still doing most of the flying, including the 100th Falcon launch of 2026, even as Musk talks about winding Falcon down once Starship flies weekly. A NASA flagship on Heavy is the kind of national-science flight that still needs that vehicle’s energy to L2.