Trump Hails ‘Golden Age of America’ as NASA Launches New Space Telescope

President Donald Trump praised NASA for the successful launch of a new space telescope on Aug. 30, saying it heralded the “Golden Age of America.”

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was launched using a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Sunday morning.

Trump posted a message on Truth Social saying, “Congratulations to NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, and the Great Patriots at NASA, on a successful launch.”

“This is THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA!” he added.

In addition to the post on Truth Social, the president called in to a press conference to personally congratulate the team behind the mission.

Trump phoned NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman as the mission’s leadership was speaking to reporters at the Kennedy Space Center.

Isaacman initially left the room to take the call from the president, before returning and holding his cell up to the microphone and telling the commander in chief, “You’re live, Mr. President.”

Trump’s voice could then be heard saying: “I just want to thank everybody and congratulate you. Boy, it looked beautiful on television.

“I just called Jared to find out if there is anything negative that I should know about like it will never be able to return. Little things like that. He said no, it’s looking great. It couldn’t be better.”

He told Isaacman and the team that they are doing “a fantastic job and I’m supplying you all that money.”

“Well, Mr. President, you got a lot of smiling people in the room right now that are very happy to hear those words, and we will put it (the money) to excellent use,” Isaacman responded, as the NASA staffers beamed beside him.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, called Roman for short, is NASA’s latest addition to its fleet of space telescopes, and is beginning a multi-year mission of cosmic discovery that is promising to dwarf that of its predecessors.

Roman will tackle several objectives. It promises to expand human understanding of dark matter and dark energy, and thereby shed more light on how the universe is expanding.

It will conduct an unprecedented cosmic survey of more than 2 billion galaxies, as well as the largest survey of planets across our galaxy outside the solar system. It will witness cosmic events that were previously undetectable by older telescopes and provide new insights into the center of our own galaxy.

“Ninety-five percent of the universe is unknown at this point in time,” Jason Hylan, Roman’s observatory project manager, told The Epoch Times in a pre-launch interview on Aug. 29.

“The Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope helped us understand that first 5 percent over the past several decades. This new one, the Nancy Roman Grace Space Telescope, will help us understand that remaining 95 percent.”

Isaacman and Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told reporters after the launch that Roman had the potential to reveal more than 100,000 exoplanets. As of Aug. 30, the total number of known exoplanets was roughly 6,000.

After launch, the telescope will have a 100-day mission to its staging point in orbit around the Sun, 1 million miles away from Earth, mission leaders told reporters. But its cameras and systems will be tested beforehand.

Mission leaders also promised that the enormous amounts of data collected by Roman will be made available to the public in real time.

T. J. Muscaro contributed to this report.