At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, engineers are putting the final touches on the agency’s latest major astrophysics project, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This ambitious $3.5-billion observatory is poised to unravel the mysteries of the dark universe, discover countless new planets, and potentially guide us to the detection of extraterrestrial life. Currently, it is in the final stages of integration and testing. Soon, it will make a brief journey to Cape Canaveral, Florida, before launching into a solar orbit near its companion, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Sources indicate that the Roman telescope might launch by fall of 2026, beating its original May 2027 schedule and possibly coming in under budget—a significant victory for NASA.

However, a draft of the president’s 2026 budget request, which Scientific American has obtained, suggests the administration intends to cancel the Roman project.

“It’s absurd. The telescope is nearly complete, and they’re thinking of not finishing it?” remarked astrophysicist David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and a former leader of the Roman science team. “That’s an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars.”

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The Roman telescope is not the only project at risk in the proposed NASA budget, which is still subject to changes and must be approved by Congress. This draft slashes NASA’s $25 billion science budget, affecting not only JWST, the dual Voyager probes, and the Hubble Space Telescope but also a fleet of Mars rovers that has captivated the global imagination for decades.

The proposed budget cuts nearly 50 percent from heliophysics, which would drop to $455 million; slashes Earth science by more than 50 percent to about $1 billion; and reduces planetary science and solar system exploration by 30 percent to $1.9 billion. This last reduction would terminate the upcoming DAVINCI mission to Venus and the troubled Mars sample return mission. It also removes two-thirds of the funding for NASA’s astrophysics division, reducing it to $487 million and explicitly states that no funds are allocated for any telescopes other than the JWST and Hubble.

Space policy observers are appalled by these cuts, especially the potential scrapping of a flagship space telescope. “This budget proposal is completely unserious,” commented Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, a senior member of NASA’s budget committee.

In private, critics are even harsher: “This destroys a program that leads the world in a historically unprecedented way,” a former government official told Scientific American, requesting anonymity due to fear of retaliation. “It’s like taking the program out back and shooting it in the head.”

NASA has been tight-lipped publicly. A spokesperson stated that the agency has received the draft “and has begun the review process.” (The White House has not responded to inquiries for comment.) The agency got the draft on April 10, the day after Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, claimed during his confirmation hearing that the U.S. could achieve lunar and Martian human landings within the existing budget. “I believe the president wants to usher in a golden age of science and discovery,” Isaacman stated. However, critics argue that the administration is instead trading away the entire cosmos.

“If you want to discard the most successful mission fleet ever, along with its leadership, this is the budget for it,” another top space scientist stated anonymously, citing fear of financial backlash from the Trump administration. “This budget is like being handed the worst possible deal with no perks—not even a plate!”

“Equivalent to 200 Hubbles”

This isn’t the first time Trump’s administration has attempted to eliminate funding for the Roman project—it’s the fourth. However, Congress has previously kept the program alive. There is hope among observers that bipartisan support for space science will save the telescope once more.

The telescope was renamed in 2020 in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, an astronomer crucial to the Hubble project, after previously being known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). Since a 2010 National Academy of Sciences review, the Roman telescope has been considered a high priority in astrophysics, a status further reinforced two years later when the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which builds and operates spy satellites, donated two large, spare mirrors and related optics to the mission.

Designed to survey our planet, the NRO’s 2.4-meter-wide mirrors, while matching Hubble’s size, feature a shorter focal length ideal for wide-field imaging surveys that observe millions of stars and provide expansive views of supernovae, early galaxies, and large-scale cosmological structures. “Imagine every Hubble image you’ve seen—now imagine it 100 times larger,” Spergel explained. “It’s like having 200 Hubbles at our disposal. We can survey the entire sky with images of Hubble quality.”

Despite initially being overbudget, the project team has managed to steer the Roman mission back on track, poised to deliver it ahead of the planned 2027 launch and potentially below cost. This turnaround comes despite past criticisms from federal and congressional bodies concerning overspending and delays in major space missions.

“The team should be celebrated, not criticized,” the former government official stated. “This is exactly what we aim for. This is the achievement we seek.”

Riddles in the Dark

Like its counterpart JWST, the Roman telescope operates in the infrared spectrum, which enables it to detect ancient, distant celestial bodies whose light has shifted into longer, redder wavelengths over vast distances. One of its core scientific objectives is to collect a wide range of data necessary to decipher dark energy, the enigmatic force propelling the universe’s accelerated expansion.

“Roman possesses the sensitivity required to probe the enigmas of dark energy, which accounts for about 70 percent of the universe and remains poorly understood,” Spergel noted.

Interestingly, recent data from other observations suggest that this dark energy, which appears to be driving galaxies apart at an increasing rate, might actually be weakening over time. Roman is designed to complement the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope, which observes at visible wavelengths, and the powerful, soon-to-be-operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory on the ground in Chile. “These missions don’t just duplicate each other’s work,” stated Henk Hoekstra, an astronomer at Leiden University who studies dark energy. “Given our bizarre universe, would you rely on a single measurement to build our entire understanding?” Additionally, an instrument on Roman—a coronagraph meant to block starlight—is a crucial prototype for NASA’s next major astrophysics flagship, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which will search for signs of life in the atmospheres of distant, habitable planets. Eliminating Roman would mean losing all the insights from this technological demonstration, and observers say it would also undermine current and future astrophysical research. Moreover, scrapping Roman could damage international collaborations. For these partnerships to work, Hoekstra emphasizes, international colleagues must trust that “projects can’t just be abruptly halted.”

Many of the budget’s proposed cancellations would do just that.

“Why even bother planning grand endeavors if, on a whim, we can just decide to abandon them?” lamented the senior space scientist. “These projects take generations to build and can empower multiple generations of scientists. They should not be discarded lightly.”