NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will soon launch to unravel the mysteries of dark energy and dark matter
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is prepared for launch in a clean room at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. NASA/Chris Gunn
Alan Dressler stared in awe at the line of Hubble telescopes stretching out in front of him. It took NASA two decades to design and build its own Hubble Space Telescope, which transformed our understanding of the galaxies and stars after its 1990 launch. Now, standing inside a New York defense contractor’s clean room in 2012, Dressler faced an assembly line of Hubble clones. They weren’t astronomy telescopes. They were spy satellites of equal capability. And one of them was being given to NASA for free.
So begins the saga of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which now sits in Florida, ready to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket within weeks. Roman will offer unprecedented knowledge of dark energy and dark matter, the mysterious components of the universe that explain our very existence. It will find more alien worlds outside our solar system than ever before, and it will also test a crucial technology that may one day reveal life on such worlds. It is, in the words of Julie McEnery of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the mission’s senior project scientist, a telescope capable of “spectacular things.” And the story of how Roman arrived at the launchpad is as amazing as the science it will perform. The observatory’s core was built to spy on America’s adversaries in a post-9/11 world. When that program collapsed, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) found itself with spare telescopes it no longer needed. Would NASA like any of them, officials asked? The space agency jumped at the offer. Roman’s story is not only a tale of important science and unlikely interagency cooperation but also one of unusual efficiency. It is set to launch under budget and ahead of schedule, a feat almost unheard of for complex astronomical observatories. “When we get things right and have success stories like Nancy Grace Roman, let’s learn from some of the magic that created that outcome,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in an April press conference.
Not only did the spacecraft begin its life in a bizarre twist of fate, but it also has evaded death on multiple occasions. It’s a telescope that for many reasons simply shouldn’t exist, yet here it stands, ready to cast its eye onto the heavens. And in a way, its ultimate mission isn’t so far off from what it was built for. It will still be spying for secrets, after all—but this time, for the secrets of the cosmos.
At the end of the millennium, astronomers made a Nobel Prize–winning discovery that upended modern cosmology. Looking at exploding stars called type Ia supernovae, they found an odd pattern—the supernovae farthest away were dimmer than expected. Scientists had known for decades that the universe was expanding, but this new finding pointed at something even more remarkable: the expansion was speeding up.
To explain this acceleration, astronomers came up with dark energy, an invisible force or pressure that was driving galaxies apart faster and faster and accounted for more than two thirds of the universe’s mass and energy. Albert Einstein had predicted the existence of such an effect in 1917—he invented a “cosmological constant” to explain why the universe was static. He nixed it, though, after the discovery in the 1920s that the universe was expanding. About a century later his prediction is back on the table as a possible reason for the accelerating expansion. Not only did the spacecraft begin its life in a bizarre twist of fate, but it also has evaded death on multiple occasions. Solving the mystery of dark energy will require better observations of supernovae across the universe, plus measurements of the shapes and positions of as many galaxies as possible, which scientists will use to study the cosmic structure dictated by the other component of the universe’s dark sector—dark matter. By the end of the 2000s understanding this dark universe had become one of the highest priorities in astrophysics, and in 2010 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine told NASA to build a telescope to study it in its Decadal Survey, which sets NASA’s priorities every 10 years.
That instrument was called the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). With a primary mirror measuring just over a meter across—half the size of Hubble’s—WFIRST would conduct a large survey of the sky to map the expansion of the universe and probe distant galaxies. From the start, however, it faced considerable opposition from astronomers who wanted NASA to expand the purview of the telescope, particularly to include exoplanet research, which was becoming the next big thing in astronomy. “We were having a hard time getting traction in the community,” says Dressler, now an emeritus astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science and one of the early leads on WFIRST. “They wanted to do something much more ambitious.” At a 2011 meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), Dressler and his colleagues tried to sell the plan. “That meeting was very controversial,” he says. “A lot of people thought we shouldn’t be wasting our money on this.” Much of NASA’s budget for building telescopes at the time was going toward the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which already had a projected cost of $8.7 billion and would balloon to about $10 billion by the time it launched in 2021. WFIRST, before it even got going, looked dead in the water.
So it came as a shock when David Spergel, a theoretical astrophysicist then at Princeton University and a scientific adviser to the mission, quietly pulled Dressler aside at the 2011 meeting and said that WFIRST might have an extraordinary savior—the NRO. The spy agency had spare telescopes it no longer needed, Spergel said, and had asked NASA if it wanted some of them. It was an unbelievable stroke of luck. Was it too good to be true?
Nancy Grace Roman was NASA’s first chief astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1970s. Roman was known as the “Mother of Hubble” for her role in developing orbital observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope.
In the 1990s the NRO launched a spy satellite project called Future Imagery Architecture. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the agency doubled down on the program, aiming to build a new era of high-tech telescopes to gather satellite data on America’s adversaries. With Hubble-size mirrors, the telescopes would be able to see objects on Earth smaller than a coffee mug—a feat revealed in a 2019 tweet by President Donald Trump that showed an image of an Iranian rocket launch site from a comparable satellite.
But the project, contracted to Boeing, lagged behind schedule and ran over budget. An investigation by The New York Times found that the total price tag ran up to $13 billion more than its original projected cost of $5 billion. Officials decided to scrap the plan in 2005—but not before some of its hardware had already been constructed. That hardware was sitting in a clean room at a defense company called Exelis, later acquired by L3Harris, in Rochester, N.Y. Michael Moore, then NASA’s acting deputy director for astrophysics, had been a liaison for the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s and heard from his contacts that some excess equipment might become available. He decided to try for a long shot. “When it became obvious that they were going to have some surplus hardware, I went to the program manager and asked about whether the systems would be available,” Moore says. “At that time, the answer was no.” But by the time of that 2011 AAS meeting, the decision had changed. “I got a call, and they had revisited their position,” Moore says. NASA could have some of the telescopes if it wanted them.
The spy agency had “identified surplus telescope assets that were no longer required” and “determined that our telescope assemblies met or exceeded the specifications NASA required” for WFIRST, according to an NRO spokesperson. So the agency decided to offer the mirrors to NASA—its garbage, essentially, was NASA’s gold. “NRO is proud that technology developed under NRO programs will contribute to groundbreaking discoveries.”
Astronomers met at Princeton University in the summer of 2011 to discuss what they could do with the telescopes. It quickly became clear that one of the scopes would be perfect for WFIRST. Not only would the repurposed spy telescope give WFIRST a mirror twice the size of the one in the original plan, but it would also enable the addition of an instrument called a coronagraph, which would let it block the light of distant stars to image nearby planets, appeasing disgruntled members of the exoplanet community. The following year officials formally made their offer to NASA. An NRO representative traveled to NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., and met in a secure room with John Grunsfeld, then the agency’s top science official. He was told that the clandestine agency had two partially disassembled Hubble-class telescopes up for grabs, each with a 2.4-meter (7.9-foot) mirror, and a third primary mirror with some spare components available. Before long, Dressler, Grunsfeld, and other scientists and engineers traveled to Rochester to see the telescopes in person. They walked into a clean room to find a row of pristine mirrors—all near-replicas of Hubble. “It was beautiful,” Grunsfeld says. Their findings helped to convince then NASA administrator Charlie Bolden, who had the final say, to accept the offer. In five years of observing, Roman will survey about 12 percent of the sky and image billions of galaxies. It would still take considerable work to turn the spy telescopes into space telescopes. NASA would receive the 2.4-meter mirror, its supporting struts and a smaller secondary mirror but would need to strip the assembly of its confidential parts and build instruments and cameras. It would also, of course, need to launch the thing. Because of those extra costs, NASA later declined to take the other telescopes, one of which had a slight fault in its mirror.
The fate of the extra telescopes, and whether they are still in Rochester, is unknown. NASA, the NRO and L3Harris, which acquired Exelis in 2015, did not respond to questions about the equipment’s location. Ultimately it would take more than a decade to transform the telescope from a spy satellite into a space observatory, with a final cost of about $4.3 billion. “Everything was probably taken apart and investigated,” says Dominic Benford, Roman’s program scientist at NASA headquarters. “We made it into what we wanted it to be.”
The telescope undergoes final checks and preparations for launch.
NASA/Sydney Rohde
In 2016 NASA formally began the WFIRST mission and started development, with L3Harris keeping hold of the mirror in Rochester and getting the contract to complete the further work needed.
Even then, WFIRST was not out of the woods. “We had a lot of near-death experiences,” Spergel says. “It was canceled five times in the president’s budget,” he says—twice during the Obama era and three times in the first Trump administration. Each time, Congress elected to save the mission, with astronomers, including Spergel, traveling to Washington, D.C., to sing the praises of the telescope to senators such as Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. “I don’t think this would have happened without Schumer’s support,” Spergel notes. To legitimize the mission once and for all, Thomas Zurbuchen, then head of NASA’s science projects, decided to name it. “By naming it, it basically becomes not cancelable,” he says. “You basically say, ‘We care about it a lot.’” Astronomer Nancy Grace Roman had passed away in 2018 at the age of 93. She had become NASA’s first chief of astronomy in the 1960s at a time when female astronomers were rare, and she was a key voice in driving support for space telescopes, particularly Hubble, earning her the nickname “Mother of Hubble.”
For Zurbuchen, Roman was the perfect namesake. He went to discuss the name with then NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, who had attended Roman’s funeral. “I said, ‘The right name for this telescope is Nancy Grace Roman,’” Zurbuchen says. “He looked at me and said, ‘Do it,’” making it the first space telescope named for a woman. Since then, the case for launching a telescope to study dark energy has strengthened considerably. New findings suggest dark energy might behave much differently than we thought. In fact, results published in 2024 by astronomers working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona suggest that dark matter might be weakening. If true, the universe might not continue expanding faster and faster forever, eventually ripping itself apart. Instead it might one day start to contract, ending in a big crunch. Those results are “spectacular timing” for Roman, McEnery says. “It looks like we might be sitting on a gold mine.”
After it launches, Roman will travel to a position of gravitational stability one million miles from Earth called the second sun-Earth Lagrange point, where the James Webb Space Telescope is also located. Roman has a field of view at least 100 times bigger than Hubble and a much more capable 300-megapixel camera. Called the Wide-Field Instrument (WFI), it takes images so large a wall of 4K televisions would be needed to display each one.
The telescope undergoes final checks and preparations for launch.
NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya
In five years of observing, Roman will survey about 12 percent of the sky and image billions of galaxies. It will look for any warping of light from these galaxies caused by clumps of dark matter curving the intervening spacetime. By mapping this effect, called weak gravitational lensing, Roman will track the distribution of matter in the universe and thus its evolution through time. Another Roman survey will search for thousands of type Ia supernovae stretching back more than 10 billion years in the 13.8-billion-year history of the universe. It should detect more of these explosions dating further back in time than any other telescope, revealing how the expansion of the universe has changed across history.
It will also measure baryon acoustic oscillations, which are a kind of sound wave that sped through the universe when it was full of plasma in the first 380,000 years after the big bang. Discovered in 2005, these waves became frozen in time as the universe expanded, which should have led to an expected distance between galaxies of about 500 million light-years, according to predictions. Any deviation from this distance “tells you how the expansion of the universe is evolving with time,” says astrophysicist Neta Bahcall of Princeton. “That gives you a determination of dark energy and dark matter.” Roman will also help narrow down what dark matter might be made of, says Anna Nierenberg, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Merced. Light from some distant galaxies will be magnified around closer massive galaxies and appear multiplied and elongated depending on the nature of the dark matter present in halos around the galaxies. Roman should find hundreds of these gravitational lenses, which it can use to rule out some dark matter models. “It’s going to be absolutely incredible,” Nierenberg says.
The solar array sun shield is installed.
Chris Gunn/NASA JPL
Roman will also be transformational for the study of exoplanets. One of its surveys will peer into the center of the Milky Way, the galactic bulge, which contains a very dense population of stars, and look for the gravitational tug of planets bending the light of more distant stars, called microlensing events. “It’ll use the microlensing technique to discover maybe a couple thousand planets both bound [to stars] and free-floating,” says Scott Gaudi, an exoplanet scientist at the Ohio State University. It should be able to spot worlds with as little mass as Earth’s moon.
It will also observe hundreds of millions of stars in the galactic bulge for any dips in light from orbiting planets, called transits, a technique that has already found the bulk of the 6,000 known planets today. Roman, however, “should find maybe 100,000 transiting planets,” says Gaudi, with sizes from Jupiter down to twice that of Earth, revealing multiple times more planets than have been seen in human history, giving us a broad sample of different planet populations across the galaxy. But the coronagraph—that instrument exoplanet scientists had been clamoring for—might be one of Roman’s biggest legacies. Technically a technology demonstration—basically an experiment to see if it works—the instrument consists of a complex series of small disks, or masks, that will suppress the light of distant stars so that the extremely faint glow of orbiting planets is visible. The goal is to reduce the contrast of each star to one part in a billion—in other words, for every one billion photons from the star, only one leaks through to Roman. That sensitivity will allow it to image planets the size of Jupiter.
If it works, we may detect the reflected light of exoplanets around other stars for the first time. All previously directly imaged planets were so hot that we simply saw their own glow, says Mary Anne Limbach, an astronomer at the University of Michigan. With Roman, however, we could see cooler planets that merely reflect their star’s light, like the planets of our solar system do. It might even be possible to see ring systems around planets. “The light from the rings will be blended in” to the dotlike point of light from the planet, Limbach says, but it will be noticeable over time. This instrument is a precursor to the coronagraph NASA wants to fly on its Habitable Worlds Observatory, a telescope set to launch in the 2040s with the goal of imaging 25 Earth-like worlds around nearby sunlike stars and probing their atmospheres for signs of life. To do this, it will need to reach a contrast of one part in 10 billion, says Beth Biller, an exoplanet scientist at the University of Edinburgh and part of Roman’s coronagraph team. That contrast should be enough to see the pale dot of a potentially inhabited world around another star. All of this means that the first detection of life outside our solar system, if it occurs, might happen because of a Rube Goldberg–like sequence of events: a collapsed spy satellite project, a call out of the blue and an offer that revitalized a space telescope fighting for survival. For the American intelligence community, it was the end of a multibillion-dollar endeavor but for astronomers, it was the start of an entirely new one. “All I know,” says Marc Postman, head of the Science Mission Office at the Space Telescope Science Institute, “is that we got a good mirror.”
Solid rocket motors take 18-24 months to build regardless of contract size
The U.S. Navy on Monday awarded Raytheon a $22.9 billion contract — the defense arm of RTX Corporation — to ramp Tomahawk cruise missile production from roughly 60 units per year to more than 1,000 over seven years, a 17-fold increase representing one of the most expansive single-weapon production commitments in American history. The contract, issued under the Department of War's Arsenal of Freedom initiative, provides RTX the long-term revenue visibility to expand its Tucson, Arizona factory complex, hire workers, and lock in sub-tier suppliers — but defense analysts and Georgetown University researchers warn that the binding constraints on delivering the 17-fold ramp are not financial. They are chemical and human.
Solid rocket motors — the propellant-based boosters that power every Tomahawk at launch before the missile's turbofan engine takes over for the cruise phase — take 18 to 24 months to manufacture from contract award to completed component, according to the Georgetown GSSR Tomahawk supply chain review. That timeline does not compress when the contract is larger. Meanwhile, the Arizona Technology Council projects that the Tucson aerospace and defense sector will be short 2,800 cleared engineering professionals and 1,400 precision manufacturing technicians by the end of 2026, according to KiTalent's Tucson defense workforce analysis — a workforce gap that RTX's announced plans to hire 1,200 additional technical staff in Tucson barely dents.
The contract formalizes framework agreements RTX and the Department of War signed February 4, 2026, and gives RTX the institutional mandate it needs to invest in factory expansion, workforce training, and supply chain development across hundreds of small and mid-sized U.S. suppliers. But a Georgetown Security Studies Review analysis published in May 2026 was direct about the gap between contractual ambition and industrial reality: the Pentagon's initiatives "represent a meaningful and necessary shift toward strengthening the industrial base, but they are unlikely to resolve immediate constraints facing Tomahawk production."
Why the United States Is Here: Operation Epic Fury and a Stockpile Burned Through
The $22.9 billion award did not emerge from peacetime planning. Since the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran on February 28, 2026, the U.S. military has fired more than 1,000 Tomahawks — consuming a substantial share of its entire standing inventory within roughly two months of sustained operations, according to CNN's U.S. missile stockpile reporting. Iran's opening counterattack involved hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles in the first days of the conflict, forcing massive expenditures of U.S. interceptor inventory alongside the strike campaign.
A May 2026 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies projected it could take at least three years for U.S. munitions stockpiles to return to pre-war levels, with Tomahawk inventories potentially constrained until late 2030 even with accelerated production — a timeline that the $22.9 billion contract does not alter, because the SRM supply chain constraint predates and persists beyond the signature. That analysis also confirms that rebuilding Tomahawk stockpiles takes years even under the most optimistic delivery projections.
Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao framed the contract in operational terms. "We called on industry to rapidly scale up munitions output, and RTX is delivering," Cao said in a statement Monday. "This landmark Tomahawk contract ensures our warfighters continue to have the lethal firepower they need." Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment Michael P. Duffey echoed the commitment: "This Tomahawk award increases our ability to equip the Joint Force, ensuring our Warfighters never face a fair fight."
Raytheon President Phil Jasper, whose Tucson campus manufactures the Tomahawk alongside the AMRAAM air-to-air missile and several other systems, called the weapon the Navy's most important strike asset. "Tomahawk is able to target hostile forces hundreds of miles away without ever risking the lives of our sailors," Jasper said. "We are making significant investments in our workforce, technology, supply chain and facilities to dramatically boost production capacity." All three quotes are drawn from RTX's official Tomahawk contract announcement.
How the Tomahawk Works — and Why the Ramp Is Technically Complex
The BGM-109 Tomahawk is not a simple munition. Its precision derives from a layered, redundant guidance architecture developed over four decades of continuous improvement — and that architecture is part of what makes scaling production difficult.
At launch, a solid rocket booster accelerates the missile from its vertical launch tube aboard a Navy destroyer or submarine. The booster then separates and the Williams F415 turbofan engine takes over, flying the Tomahawk at approximately Mach 0.7 — about 880 kilometers per hour (547 miles per hour) — at very low altitude to minimize radar exposure. For midcourse navigation, the missile combines an Inertial Navigation System (INS) with GPS updates, supplemented by Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM): a radio altimeter that continuously compares ground-elevation readings against pre-loaded digital terrain maps of the flight route, allowing precise navigation in GPS-denied or jammed environments. The Tomahawk's layered guidance architecture is what distinguishes it from simpler cruise missiles.
In the terminal phase, a second system takes over: the Digital Scene Matching Area Correlator (DSMAC), an electro-optical sensor designated AN/DXQ-1 that captures real-time imagery of the ground below and compares it against stored reference photographs of the target area. Any deviation triggers a course correction. The combined system achieves a Circular Error Probable of approximately 10 meters (33 feet). Block V variants, the latest production configuration, add a two-way satellite data link enabling mid-flight target reassignment and maritime strike capability against moving ships.
Producing this guidance architecture at 1,000 units per year — versus the current 60 — requires not just more factory floor space but a proportional expansion of every precision component: radar altimeters, electro-optical seekers, GPS receivers, turbofan engines, and the solid rocket boosters that provide initial thrust. Each has its own sub-tier supply chain. Approximately 40 percent of components for RTX's Tucson production lines originate from out-of-state suppliers, primarily in Huntsville, Dallas, and Southern California, according to KiTalent's defense workforce assessment. Modern Diplomacy's August 2026 analysis noted that Tomahawk draws thousands of subcontractors, with individual missile lead times running 18 to 24 months.
What the Contract Cannot Buy: The Solid Rocket Motor Problem
The deepest constraint the $22.9 billion contract cannot resolve is propellant chemistry. The Center for Strategic and International Studies published a dedicated report in June 2026 on solid rocket motors and their role as a binding bottleneck across every U.S. missile program — from Tomahawk to Patriot to THAAD. The CSIS solid rocket motor supply report found that planned production increases will test a supply chain still recovering from decades of consolidation and a demand collapse that followed the space shuttle program's 2011 retirement.
When the shuttle flew, it consumed roughly 20 million pounds of SRM propellant per year, sustaining a large industrial base. After 2011, annual demand fell to approximately 5 million pounds, idling facilities and driving consolidation. Today, every U.S. missile ramping simultaneously — Tomahawk, PAC-3 MSE, THAAD, SM-6, AMRAAM — draws on that same contracted propellant supply. The HTPB-45M binding agent, a synthetic rubber that holds together the ammonium perchlorate oxidizer and aluminum fuel powder that constitute most U.S. solid rocket propellant, has a single significant domestic supplier: Helicon Chemical Company in Orlando, which is still waiting for the government investment it needs to begin a capacity ramp, according to the Breaking Defense SRM supply chain investigation.
L3Harris Technologies CEO Chris Kubasik described the real problem plainly to the Jefferies Industrials conference: "We don't really need a third solid rocket motor provider. We need more companies that make nozzles. We need more companies that make igniters. We need more companies that make cases." The bottleneck is not at the system integrator level — it is at sub-tier component manufacturers producing the highly specialized ingredients that no prime contract, however large, can conjure into existence faster than chemistry and capital-intensive tooling allow.
CSIS missile defense project director Dr. Tom Karako has noted that some defense contractors are already spending their own capital to fund capacity expansion while congressional appropriation remains uncertain — a gamble, as he described it, that assumes Congress will eventually act. The RTX partnership with Italian aerospace firm Avio to build a new SRM factory in Virginia addresses part of this gap, but the facility is not expected to come online before 2028, according to the Georgetown GSSR analysis.
The Ramp Already Underway — and What It Proves
RTX has not waited for Monday's contract signature to begin accelerating. The company delivered three times more Tomahawks in the first half of 2026 than in the same period of 2025, a figure RTX's official press release confirms and that represents the production ramp already underway under earlier framework commitments. The Monday award formalizes and extends that commitment across seven years, providing the revenue certainty RTX needs to make long-duration capital investments — factory expansion, workforce training pipelines, supplier qualification programs — that would be financially irrational under single-year procurement cycles.
The Arsenal of Freedom initiative, which underpins the contract, has now seen the Department of War sign ten framework agreements since January 2026 with four prime and Tier 1 contractors: RTX, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and Honeywell Aerospace. Lockheed Martin separately holds a $58.6 billion, seven-year contract awarded July 29 for PAC-3 MSE interceptors and a $35.3 billion, seven-year THAAD production contract awarded June 24, per CSIS's missile inventory rebuilding analysis. The Tomahawk contract is the latest piece of a coordinated buildup whose scale has no post-World War II precedent in American munitions procurement.
But the Feinberg precedent — Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg's August 6 memo declaring the 30-year procurement model structurally broken and demanding wartime-speed delivery plans from contractors — makes the same point the Georgetown researchers made more academically: "No funding commitment... will produce a Patriot interceptor before mid-2028 at the absolute earliest." The same physical reality applies to Tomahawk. The contract accelerates the timeline. It does not eliminate the SRM chemistry constraint.
President Trump pushed back publicly on concerns about the stockpile shortfall on Monday, telling Fox News, "What we've used is peanuts. We have a lot of mid-level weapons," according to Fox News' contract day coverage. That characterization conflicts with the CSIS depletion assessments and with the existence of the $22.9 billion contract itself, which Duffey framed as a direct response to wartime consumption.
Does the Contract Make RTX Stock Worth Its Valuation?
For investors, Monday's award is the latest development in an extraordinary run. RTX's Q2 2026 results, reported July 23, delivered adjusted earnings per share of $1.89 — up 21 percent year-over-year — on sales of $24.7 billion, up 14 percent. Free cash flow reached $2.9 billion for the quarter, a dramatic reversal from negative $72 million in the prior-year period. The company's backlog surged to a record $289 billion — up 22 percent year-over-year — including $119 billion in defense orders, driven partly by nearly $20 billion in Raytheon awards during Q2 alone.
International demand has been a significant tailwind: Raytheon secured approximately $10 billion in international bookings in the first half of 2026, with $7 billion from Europe, as allied nations rush to rebuild their own arsenals. The company raised its full-year 2026 guidance on July 23 to adjusted sales of $95 billion to $96 billion, with adjusted EPS of $7.10 to $7.25 and free cash flow of up to $8.75 billion.
RTX separately received a contract for SM-3 Block IIA interceptors valued at $745 million from the Missile Defense Agency on August 10, underscoring that the Tomahawk award is one of several simultaneous production commitments across RTX's munitions portfolio.
The execution risk that the Georgetown and CSIS research surfaces — SRM constraints, workforce shortfalls, 18-24 month component lead times — does not make the RTX investment thesis wrong. It makes the timeline more uncertain. A company with a $289 billion backlog and a $22.9 billion contract from the U.S. Navy has extraordinary revenue visibility. Whether it can convert that visibility into 1,000 Tomahawks per year by the contract's intended production target depends on whether sub-tier suppliers and Tucson's workforce pipeline can scale as fast as the contract assumes.
How Does the US Get to 1,000 Tomahawks Per Year?
The path from 60 to 1,000 requires three parallel timelines to converge: factory investment, workforce expansion, and SRM supply chain development — each with its own physics. RTX has committed to hiring 1,200 additional technical staff in Tucson by Q4 2026, but the Arizona Technology Council's projection of a 2,800 cleared-engineer deficit by year-end means that headcount plan, even fully executed, leaves the region short, per KiTalent's Tucson workforce analysis.
On the SRM side, the new entrants the government has funded — Anduril, X-Bow, Ursa Major, Firehawk, Castelion — have yet to demonstrate volume production from prototype stages. Anduril has received $58 million under the Defense Production Act to expand SRM production and has test-fired over 700 SRMs since January 2024, targeting 6,000 SRMs annually by end 2026. Those numbers are promising for the long-term supply base but do not resolve the 2026 and 2027 gap. The RTX/Avio Virginia SRM facility expected online in 2028 represents the structural fix — but it is a 2028 fix, not a 2026 one, per Georgetown's Tomahawk supply chain assessment.
The Department of War's Acquisition Transformation Strategy explicitly directs the Pentagon to engage sub-tier suppliers directly, bypassing the traditional prime-only contracting model that left single-source dependencies invisible until they became crises, according to RTX's official contract announcement. Whether that structural reform translates to SRM propellant flowing faster than chemistry allows remains, as Dr. Karako put it, a gamble — one the U.S. military has no alternative but to make.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't Raytheon just build 1,000 Tomahawks a year right away if the money is there?
The constraint is not primarily financial — it is industrial and chemical. Solid rocket motors, which power the Tomahawk at launch, require 18 to 24 months from contract award to completed component. The propellant chemistry involves highly specialized ingredients — including HTPB-45M synthetic rubber binder — that depend on sub-tier suppliers with limited capacity, some of which are single-source. Factory floor space, precision tooling, and a workforce of cleared engineering professionals are equally constrained. A $22.9 billion contract provides the funding and demand signal for expansion. It cannot compress the physical timelines of propellant chemistry, factory construction, or skills training.
What happens if the solid rocket motor bottleneck isn't resolved before the next high-intensity conflict?
The Center for Strategic and International Studies concludes that restoring U.S. missile stockpiles to pre-Iran-war levels will take at least three years — and that "the greater strategic risk is not sustaining the current conflict but responding to another high-intensity contingency before Patriot and THAAD inventories can be rebuilt." The same logic applies to Tomahawk. The weapons most consumed by Operation Epic Fury — Tomahawk, THAAD, PAC-3 MSE, SM-6 — are precisely the systems the U.S. would need in a high-intensity confrontation in the Western Pacific or on the Korean Peninsula. A contracted production commitment that outpaces actual deliverable capacity creates a paper deterrent, not a real one.
What does the Tomahawk guidance system actually do that makes it so hard to build at scale?
The BGM-109's guidance combines four separate systems: an Inertial Navigation System for basic flight path stability; GPS updates for mid-course correction; Terrain Contour Matching (TERCOM), which uses a radar altimeter to compare live ground-elevation readings against stored terrain maps; and Digital Scene Matching Area Correlation (DSMAC), an electro-optical camera that compares real-time target imagery against pre-loaded reference photographs, achieving about 10 meters (33 feet) accuracy. Each of these systems — and especially the precision seekers, radar altimeters, and digital processing hardware — has its own component supply chain. Scaling to 1,000 units per year means proportionally expanding every one of those supply chains simultaneously, across hundreds of suppliers, many of them small specialized firms with their own capacity ceilings.
What does RTX's record backlog mean for investors, and what risks should they watch?
RTX's $289 billion backlog — including $119 billion in defense orders — provides exceptional long-term revenue visibility, and the $22.9 billion Tomahawk contract adds a significant anchor. Q2 2026 adjusted EPS grew 21 percent and the company raised full-year guidance to $7.10-$7.25 adjusted EPS. The primary execution risk is not demand — it is the company's ability to convert backlog to deliveries at the pace the contracts imply. If SRM constraints, Tucson workforce shortfalls, or congressional funding delays (the FY2027 NDAA and $18.2 billion interceptor replenishment package remain unapproved) slow actual production rates, the gap between contracted revenue and delivered revenue could widen. The contracts provide visibility; the supply chain and workforce determine whether that visibility converts to cash.
Ancient Egyptian princesses were skilled archers, trained with weapons, controversial study claims
The six, four of whom are believed to be daughters of Pharaoh Amenemhat II, were rediscovered in 2020 in the Egyptian Museum after being lost for decades.
By Miriam Sela-Eitam, Jerusalem Post, August 15, 2026
A Battle-Scene from the Rameseum at Thebes', 1890. Battle of Kadesh relief (c1275BC) at the Ramesseum memorial temple in the Theban necropolis. From "Cassell's Illustrated Universal History, Vol. I - Early and Greek History", by Edmund Ollier.
(photo credit: The Print Collector/Heritage Images via Getty Images)
Ancient Egyptian princesses buried with weapons may have been trained to use them while alive, according to a controversial study published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology in July.
Researchers examined six mummies found at the Dahshur funerary complex in the 1890s. The mummies, belonging to royal individuals from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, date to nearly 4,000-years-ago.
“Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting,” said Lead author Dr. Zeinab Hashesh. “This conclusion is supported by the way their bones developed to sustain heavy muscle use, which corresponds directly to the weapons discovered in their tombs.”
The six, four of whom are believed to be daughters of Pharaoh Amenemhat II, were rediscovered in 2020 in the Egyptian Museum after being lost for decades.
After analyzing the mummies’ muscle attachments, researchers suggested that pronounced areas in their upper limbs indicate “repetitive, high-intensity actions like pulling a bowstring or stabilizing a weapon.”
Current state of preservation of the mummy (L), 3D visualisation of the mummy: VR (C), and segmentation of the skeleton (R), April 23, 2026. (credit: Marzena Ożarek-Szilke/University of Wrocław)
Hashesh added that the conclusion explains the presence of weapons in the princess’s burial chambers, as they are traditionally associated with men.
Princess Ita, Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, and an anonymous woman provisionally identified as Princess Sathathormeryt, were all buried with bows and arrows. Ita’s coffin also held a dagger.
The two other mummies, Princess Noub-Hotep and King Hor, were buried with similar items.
“Princess Ita was a young woman aged between 28 and 34 with strong upper-body muscle attachments, suggesting she habitually used weapons like maces or daggers,” explained Hashesh. “Princess Khenmet was a woman in her late 30s or 40s who showed signs of thinning bones, but had very robust ligament attachments. Princess Itaweret was a young woman aged between 20 and 34 who survived broken ribs and foot fractures; her skeleton shows she was a skilled archer.”
Experts challenge study's claims
However, bioarchaeologists not involved in the study shared with Live Science that “skeletal changes cannot reliably indicate a specific activity,” adding that “age, body size, genetics and other repetitive movements can produce similar results.”
Sonia Zakrzewski, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Southampton who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email that the identities of the skeleton’s relies on 19th-century labels, which means that “we cannot be certain how reliable they really are.”
She added that while the attachment sites on the bones are pronounced, there is no way of proving that it was caused by archery, only that the muscles “appear to have been repeatedly used.”
"We cannot say therefore that these skeletal changes necessarily are associated with the use of weaponry," Zakrzewski said, especially since the researchers did not also study any “control” groups from the time period.
"It would be very useful to know how much such side differences exist in contemporaneous Egyptians, whether royal or not," she noted.
No clear reason why princesses buried with arrows
Additionally, she told Live Science that there is no clear reason as to why the princesses were buried with items like arrows.
"Archery is a highly asymmetrical activity,” Scott Haddow, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Turin not involved in the study, explained to Live Science via email. Finding the pronounced sites on both sides of the remains “does not make a particularly strong case for these individuals practicing archery.”
Haddow added that the individuals’ ages could also explain the differences, as “muscle-attachment sites are influenced by aging, as well as by body size and genetics.”
Other experts told Live Science they believe the researchers might be reading into the appearance of the weapons too much.
"Although the presence of funerary artifacts (e.g., arrows, daggers) makes the princesses' involvement in such activities plausible, the authors provide limited biomechanical or biomedical evidence to substantiate this claim," French anthropologist Sébastien Villotte told Live Science in an email.
Villotte, who works at the French National Center for Scientific Research, added that "a more robust approach would involve comparing these individuals to non-elite contemporaries from the same region and period.”
“This would help determine whether such degenerative changes (at these locations) were common in the general population (who were unlikely to engage in the same activities) or truly indicative of elite-specific behaviors."
However, despite the lack of control group and other uncertainties, Zakrzewski told Live Science that the importance of examining the remains should not be disregarded as “it allows us to sort of put flesh on the bones and understand more about their lives.”
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From a single point to a sky full of galaxies — here's the science (and the sitcom) behind it all.
Is "the Big Bang theory" the name of your favorite sitcom or the actual story of how everything around you came to exist? Honestly, it's both. But the real one is stranger than anything Sheldon Cooper ever diagrammed on his whiteboard.
What is the Big Bang theory? The Big Bang theory is the leading scientific explanation for how the universe began. It states that roughly13.8 billion years ago, all space, time, matter, and energy expanded rapidly from a single, infinitely hot and dense point called a singularity.
That's the short version. The long one involves quarks, gravity, leftover radiation from the dawn of time, and a Belgian priest who beat Edwin Hubble by two years. If you want to understand cosmology well enough to hold your own at trivia night, you're in the right place. If this kind of thing gets you fired up, Nibble turns ideas like this into five-minute lessons — try one before your coffee goes cold.
Quick summary: What you'll learn about the Big Bang theory
Short on time? Here's the whole universe, summarized.
The Big Bang theory explains how the universe expanded from a single point, or singularity, about 13.8 billion years ago.
Cosmic inflation, a theory from physicist Alan Guth, explains why the universe looks so smooth and flat today.
Quarks, protons, neutrons, and electrons formed within seconds, eventually combining into hydrogen and helium atoms.
Evidence like redshift, the cosmic microwave background, and satellite data from COBE and WMAP all support an expanding universe.
Big mysteries like dark matter, dark energy, and black holes prove cosmology still has homework left to do.
From a single point to infinity: What is the Big Bang theory?
Before galaxies, planets, or pizza existed, there was just a point. Let's start there.
Defining the singularity and the age of the universe
Physicists call that starting point a singularity: an infinitely dense, infinitely hot spot where the normal rules of space and time break down. Everything that exists today, every atom, every galaxy, every black hole, was once packed into it.
Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître first proposed the idea of an expanding universe in 1927, two years before Edwin Hubble's observations gave it real evidence. Albert Einstein famously doubted it at first before coming around. Today, scientists peg the age of the universe at roughly 13.8 billion years, calculated from how fast everything is still moving apart.
Cosmic inflation and Alan Guth's breakthrough
In a fraction of a second (around 10^-32 seconds) after the moment of the singularity, the universe experienced a period called "cosmic inflation". This was a very fast process by which space expanded faster than the speed of light.
Physicist Alan Guth proposed this idea in 1980 to address problems the original Big Bang theory couldn't explain, such as why the universe looks so flat and evenly spread out in every direction. Without cosmic inflation, the smooth, balanced universe you're sitting in right now probably wouldn't exist.
The cosmic timeline: How our universe developed
Once inflation settled, the universe still had a lot of growing up to do.
The first seconds: Quarks, electrons, protons, and neutrons
The cosmic inflation happened at a very rapid rate and was measured almost on a second-by-second basis.
0 to 10⁻³² seconds: Cosmic inflation expands space faster than light.
First few seconds: Quarks and electrons form, quickly clumping into protons and neutrons.
Next few minutes: Protons and neutrons fuse into light nuclei, while photons bounce endlessly off free electrons in a hot, glowing fog.
The cool down: creating hydrogen and helium atoms
About 380,000 years later, the universe cooled enough for electrons to settle into orbit around protons. That moment, called recombination, created the first true hydrogen and helium atoms. It also lets photons travel freely for the first time instead of constantly scattering off loose electrons. That ancient light is still out there, and scientists now study it as the cosmic microwave background.
Gravity steps in: From cosmic soup to galaxies and galaxy clusters
With atoms in place, gravity took over. Slightly denser pockets of gas pulled in more matter, collapsing into the first stars. Those stars are grouped into galaxies, and galaxies are clustered into galaxy clusters, the largest structures we know. This didn't happen overnight; it took hundreds of millions of years.
But it's why you can look up on a clear night and see the Milky Way instead of an empty, even haze.
The clues left behind: How do we know it happened?
A theory this big needs serious evidence, and the Big Bang theory has plenty.
Edwin Hubble and the redshift of an expanding universe
In 1929, Edwin Hubble made an interesting discovery about our universe – that galaxies farther from us were receding much faster than those closer to us. The light from these distant galaxies appears to be redshifted, similar to how the pitch of a siren becomes lower as it moves away from you.
That stretching is direct evidence of an expanding universe. Hubble's name now belongs to both the Hubble constant, which measures how fast the universe expands, and the Hubble Space Telescope, still hunting for answers today.
Arno Penzias, Robert Wilson, and the cosmic microwave background
In 1965, engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson tried to fix a persistent hiss in their radio antenna. They cleaned it, checked for pigeon droppings, and ruled out every earthly cause they could think of. That hiss was the cosmic microwave background, or CMB: leftover radiation from recombination, stretched out by billions of years of expansion.
It's the oldest light in the universe, and it shows up in every direction, all the time. The discovery earned Penzias and Wilson a Nobel Prize.
How COBE and WMAP mapped the early universe
Later missions took that discovery further. The COBE satellite, launched in 1989, confirmed the CMB's near-perfect uniformity and detected tiny temperature variations. WMAP, launched in 2001, mapped those variations in greater detail, helping pin down the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years.
Both missions gave cosmologists hard data to test against theory, turning the Big Bang from an educated guess into one of the most well-supported ideas in science.
The missing pieces: Dark matter, dark energy, and black holes
For all this evidence, the universe still keeps plenty of secrets.
Einstein's general relativity vs quantum theory
Albert Einstein's general relativity explains gravity beautifully at huge scales: planets, galaxies, even black holes, those collapsed remnants of dying stars where gravity gets so strong that nothing escapes. Quantum theory, meanwhile, governs the tiny stuff: quarks, electrons, photons.
The catch is that the two don't play well together, and that gap leaves room for mysteries like dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is an invisible mass that holds galaxies together with extra gravity. Dark energy is the unexplained force speeding up the universe's expansion. Together, they make up most of everything, and scientists still don't fully understand either.
Fred Hoyle and the steady state alternative
Funny enough, astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term "Big Bang" in 1949 as a bit of a put-down, didn't believe in it himself. He championed a rival idea called the steady state theory, which argued the universe had no beginning. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background settled the debate. Hoyle's nickname stuck around, even after his theory didn't.
Beyond the physics: The pop culture explosion
Decades later, the name took on an entirely new life.
Why Sheldon, Leonard, and Penny dominated our screens
The sitcom "The Big Bang Theory" borrowed its name purely for the laugh, not the lecture. Sheldon, Leonard, Penny, and the rest of the gang turned physics nerds into household names across twelve seasons, even though the show rarely covered actual cosmology.
Still, it's probably why many people search this exact phrase, expecting a TV recap instead of a science lesson. No judgment here. Now you've got both answers in your back pocket.
Ready to stop forgetting the universe? Build a real knowledge habit with Nibble
Reading about the Big Bang theory makes two things obvious: the universe is mind-blowingly fascinating, and keeping all these ideas straight, quarks, dark matter, and general relativity, feels like a lot to juggle. You close this tab, and by tomorrow, half the details have slipped away. That's not a memory problem. It's a consistency problem. Most of us rely on random searches instead of a real system for building knowledge.
This is where Nibble comes in. You don't need to crack open a 400-page physics textbook to understand the universe. Nibble breaks down some of the biggest ideas in human history, from cosmology and math to art history and philosophy, into interactive text lessons, games, and audio episodes that take just minutes a day across 20-plus topics. It's a Top 15 Free Education App in the US with over 9 million downloads, built to be the structured habit that stops information from going in one ear and out the other.
Frequently Asked Questions on the Big Bang theory
What is the Hubble constant?
The Hubble constant measures how fast the universe is expanding at any given distance. Named after Edwin Hubble, it tells scientists that for every additional megaparsec away a galaxy sits, it's moving away roughly 70 kilometers per second faster. It's one of the key numbers cosmologists use to calculate the universe's age and size.
How do the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb help us see the Big Bang?
The Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope capture light that's been traveling for billions of years, letting astronomers see galaxies as they looked in the early universe. Since light takes time to reach us, looking farther away really does mean looking further back in time, almost like flipping through a cosmic photo album.
Was the Big Bang actually an explosion?
Not in the way you're picturing. There was no blast moving through existing space, because space itself didn't exist yet. The Big Bang was an expansion of space, time, and energy from a single point, not an explosion within space. Calling it a "bang" is mostly a historical habit, courtesy of Fred Hoyle's sarcastic nickname.
Who first proposed the Big Bang theory?
Georges Lemaître, a Belgian priest and physicist, proposed the idea of an expanding universe in 1927, two years before Edwin Hubble's observations provided evidence for it. Lemaître called it his "hypothesis of the primeval atom." Decades later, Fred Hoyle gave it the catchier, slightly mocking name we use today.
What's the difference between dark matter and dark energy?
Dark matter is an invisible mass that adds extra gravity, helping hold galaxies and galaxy clusters together. Dark energy is a mysterious force linked to the accelerating expansion of the universe. Both remain unexplained, but they affect the cosmos in opposite ways: one pulls things together, and the other pushes everything apart.
