Following the successful launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman space telescope on Sunday, the agency held a press conference to discuss the observatory’s upcoming science operations. However, the standard post-launch briefing took a strange turn when the president of the United States unexpectedly intervened to congratulate NASA on the mission it repeatedly tried to scrap. About halfway through Sunday’s press 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 conference over the loudspeaker. “I just want to thank everyone and congratulate you. Wow, it looked beautiful on TV,” Trump said of the launch of the Roman space telescope, according to Space.com. “Jared is doing a fantastic job, you’re doing a fantastic job, and I’m giving you all that money.” Trump vs. Roman 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 study massive areas of the sky and provide clues to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, such as dark energy and matter. But Roman almost didn’t make it to the launch pad. In fact, the telescope survived several attempts at termination 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, canceling at least 41 missions. Leaked budget cuts suggested that no telescopes other than the Hubble and Webb space telescopes would have received funding. At that time, the Roman telescope was almost completely assembled before its scheduled launch. The proposed budget would have completely ended the mission, which had been years in the making. When the president’s reduced official budget was released, the administration did not completely cancel the telescope, but its prospects were still not much better. The White House allocated $156.6 million for continued development of Roman in 2026, less than half of what the mission received in 2025. Fortunately, the proposed cuts to NASA’s budget were avoided in Congress. Trump’s determination to cancel the Roman mission even preceded budget cuts proposed last year. During the president’s first term, the Trump administration attempted to cancel the mission on three separate occasions between 2019 and 2021. Taking all the credit, Trump’s tremulous relationship with the groundbreaking telescope was not conveyed during the president’s impromptu call to Sunday’s press conference. In fact, the president seems to want to take credit for NASA’s recent success. During the call, Trump recalled his visit to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2016, when he saw “grass growing through the cracks in the runways, and there were a lot of cracks.” “And I looked; that place was closed… It was literally closed. And now, again, as we are with the country itself, we are the hottest there is,” the president added. “We are the hottest. You are the hottest in space and we have the hottest country 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 the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. During his visit, Trump signed an executive order to establish the first US Space Academy in the country to train the industry’s workforce. When asked about the president’s congratulatory call for a telescope that he had tried to cancel, Isaacman responded by saying, “I’m incredibly grateful for your support, the space policy, the resources. It looks like from that call, maybe even more resources, which is also a great thing for more science and discovery missions.”
