NASA’s Roman Space Telescope takes flight and Starlink endures

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope , sailing through space with its sunshield deployed in this illustration, on its way to the second Lagrange point. Roman, NASA’s next-generation observatory, is set to launch Aug. 30 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Credit: NASA

Rocket launches this week

On Monday, Aug. 24, state-owned firm, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), is targeting 11:20 p.m. EDT for a Long March 6C launch from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in northeastern China, according to tracking from Next Spaceflight. The Long March 6C is a two-stage, medium-lift vehicle launching for only the second time and will be carrying an undisclosed payload.

On Tuesday, Aug. 25, SpaceX targets 5:33 a.m. EDT for the Starlink Group 10-49 mission from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, with the booster set to land on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic. Watch it here.

On Wednesday, Aug. 26, SpaceX returns to the pad with Starlink Group 15-22 from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 5:27 a.m. EDT, targeting a booster landing on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific. Watch it here.

On Thursday, Aug. 27, the European Space Agency (ESA) is targeting 4:10 p.m. EDT for the launch of the MTG-I2 weather satellite on an Ariane 62 rocket from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. MTG-I2 is the third satellite in ESA’s Meteosat Third Generation constellation, designed to deliver detailed weather forecasting for Europe and northern Africa. The flight marks Ariane 6’s first-ever mission to geostationary transfer orbit, and the ninth flight for ESA’s heavy lift vehicle.

Finally, on Sunday, Aug. 30, NASA is planning to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope at 7:26 a.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, bound for the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (or L2) roughly 1 million miles from Earth. The 18,000-pound (8,165 kg) observatory is the lone payload. NASA’s launch page has countdown details and a livestream link as the date approaches.

Roman is NASA’s next-generation space telescope. It will have a field of view 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s, letting it capture a much wider patch of sky. Where Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope are built to stare deeply at individual targets, Roman is designed to survey wide swaths of sky at speed. The observatory carries two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument, a nearly 300-megapixel camera that captures those broad, high-resolution images, and the Coronagraph Instrument, which blocks out starlight to directly image faint objects like planets and debris disks around nearby stars. Roman will conduct a number of surveys across the field of astronomy, helping scientists uncover the nature of dark energy, learn more about the population of planets across the galaxy through gravitational microlensing, and track transient events like supernovae over time.

Rocket launches last week

On Aug. 18, Chinese commercial launch company LandSpace flew their Zhuque-3 rocket from the Gobi Desert for the second time, and successfully landed its first stage at a recovery pad — the first booster landing by a Chinese private company, following lessons learned from a failed attempt at the rocket’s December 2025 debut.

In a series of posts to X, LandSpace said the booster is now being transported back to its assembly facility for inspection and refurbishment as the company works toward reflying it. Some observers on social media have reported that the booster may have tipped over after a fire damaged one of its landing legs, though LandSpace itself has not confirmed any such incident. The landing stands as a milestone: Zhuque-3 joins Falcon 9, New Glenn, and China’s state-run Long March 10B as the only rockets to have recovered a first stage.

SpaceX added three more Starlink missions to the week — Group 17-50 from Vandenberg on Aug. 19, Group 10-39 from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 21, and Group 15-20 from Vandenberg on Aug. 22.

Rocket Lab also flew its 93rd Electron mission, “The Lightning God Defends,” from Mahia, New Zealand, on Aug. 20, deploying the ninth satellite for Japanese tech company iQPS’s synthetic aperture radar constellation.

The week closed with Russia’s launch of a navigation satellite on a Soyuz 2.1b rocket from northwestern Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome on Aug. 23, adding to GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System), Russia’s GPS-equivalent constellation.

Upcoming rocket launches

On Monday, Aug. 31, Rocket Lab is targeting an Electron launch from Mahia for “Owl Around The World,” deploying the 11th StriX synthetic aperture radar satellite for Japan’s Synspective. SpaceX also has two more Starlink missions on the board for early September: Group 15-23 from Vandenberg on Sept. 1, and Group 15-24 from Vandenberg on Sept. 4.

Brooks Mendenhall is a staff writer for Astronomy and is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.