NASA's new space telescope, taken apart the morning it launched.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope left the pad on 30 August 2026 and will not send an image home until 2027. Until then, the only way to see it working is a film. This one takes it apart, subsystem by subsystem, in the order the light travels, and puts it back together exactly where engineering put it. It shipped the same day.
Nothing on screen is invented: every part sits where the engineering model places it, every figure comes from NASA's published data, and the light falls from where the solar array points. The film ships only after its checks pass — that the camera never leaves the machine, that the shot never sits still, that every piece returns to its seat.
In pieces
It opens with the observatory floating apart — barrel, mirror assembly, instrument bay, bus, antenna, solar array — and lets it come together before you have read the first number. Twelve point seven metres, eight thousand kilograms, nine months ahead of schedule.
The breakdown, in the order the light travels
Each subsystem leaves the spacecraft as the narration names it and stays out, so the machine dismantles itself as you walk through it: the stray-light barrel, a 2.4-metre mirror built for a spy satellite and reshaped to look out, the 300-megapixel instrument cooled by radiators alone, a bus carrying 32,000 wires, an 11-kilogram antenna sending 1.4 terabytes a day, and the solar array that doubles as its sunshade.
Back together, where engineering put it
Everything returns in one continuous move, inside parts first, the barrel closing last — while the narration tells how a thousand people built it, shook it to 125 percent of launch loads and ran it 65 days in vacuum. The build checks that every piece lands on its exact seat before the film is allowed to ship.
If it has a CAD file, it can have a film. Yours can be ready before your hardware is.
This piece runs on public data. Imagine it on your spacecraft, your instrument, your numbers.