NASA’s Next Great Telescope Isn’t a Telescope. It’s a Cold War Spy Satellite.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is about to change astronomy, but not because it sees deeper. It’s a repurposed Cold War spy satellite that sees wider, mapping billions of galaxies instead of single stars. The leftovers of the security sector are outperforming purpose-built instruments, and the real bottleneck is no longer the universe—it’s our capacity to process 1.5TB of cosmic data every single day.