Following the successful launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Sunday, the agency held a news conference to discuss the observatory’s upcoming science operations. The standard post-launch briefing took a weird turn, however, when the U.S. president unexpectedly chimed in to congratulate NASA on the mission he repeatedly tried to scrap.
About halfway through Sunday’s news conference, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman received a call from President Donald Trump. Isaacman briefly left the room and returned with the president on the line, speaking at the press briefing through speakerphone.
“I just want to thank everybody, and congratulate you. Boy, it looked beautiful on television,” Trump said of the Roman space telescope’s launch, according to Space.com. “Jared is doing a fantastic job, you are doing a fantastic job, and I’m supplying you all that money.”
The Roman space telescope launched on August 30 at 7:25 a.m. ET. NASA’s $4 billion observatory is equipped with sharp infrared vision and a wide field of view to survey massive areas of the sky and provide clues to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries like dark energy and dark matter.
But Roman almost didn’t make it to the launch pad. In fact, the telescope survived several termination attempts by the president. In April 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cut NASA’s science program in half, cancelling at least 41 missions. Leaked budget cuts suggested that no telescope besides the Hubble and Webb space telescopes would have received funding.
At that point, the Roman telescope was nearly fully assembled ahead of its scheduled launch. The proposed budget would have fully terminated the mission, which had been years in the making.
When the president’s official skinny budget was released, the administration didn’t outright call off the telescope, but its prospects were still not all that much better. The White House allocated $156.6 million to Roman’s continued development in 2026, less than half of what the mission received in 2025. Luckily, the proposed cuts to NASA’s budget were averted in Congress.
Trump’s determination to cancel the Roman mission even preceded last year’s proposed budget cuts. During the president’s first term, the Trump administration tried to cancel the mission on three separate occasions between 2019 and 2021.
Trump’s tremulous relationship with the groundbreaking telescope was not conveyed during the president’s impromptu call to Sunday’s news conference. In fact, the president seems to want to give himself credit for NASA’s recent success.
During the call, Trump recalled visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2016, when he saw “grass was growing through the cracks in the runways, and there were a lot of cracks.”
“And I looked; that place was closed … It was just literally closed. And now, again, like we are with the country itself, we’re the hottest there is,” the president added. “We’re the hottest. You’re the hottest in space, and we have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
After proposing budget cuts that would have destroyed the agency’s prospects, the president suddenly has NASA fever. Trump visited NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Friday, where he awarded the agency’s Artemis 2 crew with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. During his visit, Trump signed an executive order to establish the nation’s first U.S. Space Academy to train the industry’s workforce.
When asked about the president’s congratulatory call for a telescope he had tried to cancel, Isaacman responded by saying, “I’m incredibly grateful for his support, the space policy, the resources. Sounds like from that call, maybe even more resources, which is also a great thing for more missions of science and discovery.”
Source: Gizmodo