Nasa space telescope launches after surviving Trump budget cuts

Searching for exoplanets and clues on planet formation, the Roman telescope begins million-mile journey from Florida launchpad A $4.3bn space telescope that Donald Trump tried to kill has lifted off from Florida as Nasa embarks on the next stage of its quest to unlock the secrets of the universe. The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope survived two rounds of proposed White House budget cuts, and began a million-mile journey into deep space from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center on Sunday morning. . Sunday’s launch marked “an endpoint for the engineers, ⁠but it’s a starting point for the scientists,” Julie McEnery, the telescope’s senior project scientist, told reporters, including Reuters, at a post-launch news conference. “It feels like I’m on the edge of a precipice, and we’re just about to set a foot off into the unknown.” Searching chiefly for exoplanets and clues about planetary formation, it is set to join the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes in the annals of Nasa’s storied history of space exploration. But as next-generation equipment almost 10 years in the making, the Roman telescope, named for the space agency’s first chief of astronomy, who died in 2018, is many