The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch this Sunday, is poised to revolutionize our understanding of dark energy and discover thousands of new exoplanets. It is a stunning scientific triumph, but more importantly, it is a triumph of American hoarding.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch this Sunday, is poised to revolutionize our understanding of dark energy and discover thousands of new exoplanets. It is a stunning scientific triumph, but more importantly, it is a triumph of American hoarding. The Roman telescope, you see, was not originally built to gaze at the stars, but was constructed by the National Reconnaissance Office to spy on the Earth before being abruptly canceled and left in a storage facility.
When I first learned this over drinks with a senior Lockheed Martin executive at a gala last spring, I was profoundly moved. We are taking a machine designed for terrestrial paranoia and turning it toward the infinite. In a very real sense, the military-industrial complex has become the ultimate patron of human wonder.
Consider the awe-inspiring reality of this hardware. Back in 2012, the NRO casually called up NASA and offered them two spare, Hubble-sized telescopes that had just been sitting in a warehouse in upstate New York. The intelligence community simply didn’t need them anymore. To a science writer, there is nothing more breathtaking than the realization that the apex of human astronomical engineering is literally the Defense Department’s trash.
NASA has spent the last decade retrofitting the NRO’s cast-off, outfitting it with a state-of-the-art coronagraph to block out starlight and directly image distant planets. This painstaking process of stripping out classified guidance software and replacing it with civilian instruments is a beautiful testament to the resilience of the scientific method. One can only imagine the thrill the NASA engineers felt when they popped the hood on this classified behemoth and discovered its targeting sensors were already wired to perfectly track a target moving at Mach 3.
Critics of the defense budget often complain about the trillions spent on classified surveillance programs. But they are missing the larger cosmic picture. If the intelligence agencies are discarding 2.4-meter primary mirrors—the exact same size as the Hubble Space Telescope but with a field of view 100 times larger—just imagine the magnificent, physics-defying instruments they are currently using to read license plates in Pyongyang.
It is truly humbling to realize that our species’ most profound questions about the origins of time and space will be answered by a piece of hardware that was deemed insufficiently sharp to photograph Iranian centrifuges.
The Roman telescope’s new mission is to measure the expansion of the universe. This is a fitting metaphor, as the only thing expanding faster than the cosmos is the Pentagon’s classified procurement budget. We are taking an instrument forged in the crucible of terrestrial conflict and asking it to map the distribution of dark matter. It is the ultimate swords-to-plowshares story, assuming the plowshare is a highly classified optical sensor originally intended to track troop movements in the Middle East.
Some in the scientific community have expressed unease at this pipeline, arguing that civilian space exploration shouldn't have to rely on the leftovers of a planetary surveillance state. To them, I say: grow up. If we have to wait for Congress to adequately fund the National Science Foundation, we will never find out if we are alone in the universe. If the only way we get a next-generation orbital observatory is by waiting for the CIA to upgrade to something better, then we should be writing thank-you notes to Langley.
The sheer scale of the Roman telescope’s capabilities should make us all pause in reverent silence. It will generate terabytes of data daily, capturing the faint, ancient glow of distant galaxies. It will probe the atmospheres of super-Earths for signs of biological activity. And it will do all of this using the exact same focal plane architecture that was originally optimized to identify hostile radar installations from low Earth orbit.
I cannot help but look up at the night sky and feel a sense of profound optimism. Perhaps one day we will probe the icy oceans of Europa using a repurposed orbital kinetic strike platform. Perhaps the grand unified theory of physics is already known to an aerospace contractor who is just waiting for their non-disclosure agreement to expire.
We must stop viewing the militarization of space as a tragedy, and start viewing it as a down payment on our astronomical future. The universe is vast, cold, and entirely indifferent to our petty squabbles. But thanks to the sheer, magnificent paranoia of the American intelligence apparatus, we finally have the spare parts lying around to look at it.