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Fire spews from the 27 Merlin engines of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket during the launch of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Aug. 30, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)<\/p>\n
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket can generate some serious thrust, leading to incredible displays of fireworks as seen in the photo above.<\/p>\n
What is it?<\/p>\n In this photo, the 27 Merlin engines of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket spew fire as they generate the thrust that sent NASA’s revolutionary Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope<\/a> to orbit on a picture-perfect morning launch<\/a> on Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Falcon Heavy sent Roman to a gravitationally stable parking spot known as Lagrange Point 2, located 1 million miles away (1.5 million kilometers) between Earth and Mars, where the gravitational pulls of the sun and Earth equal out.<\/p>\n Once there, the Roman Space Telescope will spend a few months coming online before it begins conducting groundbreaking science, searching the universe for signs of dark energy and dark matter<\/a> and hunting for distant exoplanets<\/a>.<\/p>\n Why is it incredible?<\/p>\n SpaceX only pulls out Falcon Heavy<\/a> when it needs incredible heavy-lift capability. The rocket essentially consists of three Falcon 9 rocket boosters attached to one another, whose combined 27 Merlin engines can generate over 5 million pounds (2.27 million kilograms) of thrust. That lift power enables Falcon Heavy to send large payloads to distant destinations.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Aside from Roman, other notable Falcon Heavy missions include the 2024 launch of the Europa Clipper mission<\/a> to Jupiter’s icy moon, the Psyche probe<\/a> that will investigate a metal-rich asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and most famously, a Tesla Roadster convertible<\/a> featuring a mannequin ‘driver’.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fire spews from the 27 Merlin engines of a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket during the launch of NASA’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612401,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,82,247],"class_list":["post-612400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612400\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/612401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}