AIAC PREMIERES 'SHE OPENED THE HEAVENS,'A MUSICAL TRIBUTE TO NANCY GRACE ROMAN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD- August 30, 2026 -She Opened the Heavens, an original musical video tribute to Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, the "Mother of Hubble," premiered at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, at a pre-launch gathering of approximately 300 scientists, family members, and guests. The video met with sustained applause at the all-day meeting, which was led by Dr. Julie McEnery, senior project scientist for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and included an address by Dr. David Spergel, co-chair of the mission's Science Definition Team. Following the screening, AIAC released the video worldwide on YouTube, Vimeo, and LinkedIn.

Composed to commemorate the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30, 2026, the tribute features original lyrics, music, and orchestration by L. M. Levie, Chair of AIAC and Poet Laureate and Trustee of The Explorers Club, with videography by Isabel C. Carro-Toro, AIAC Vice President.

The video traces Roman's career from her childhood in Nashville, where she was told repeatedly that astronomy was no place for a woman, through her appointment as NASA's first Chief of Astronomy and first woman executive, to her campaign before Congress that secured funding for the Hubble Space Telescope. It closes on the observatory that now carries her name, which is designed to survey the sky up to a thousand times faster than Hubble, to identify thousands of planets beyond our solar system, and to help explain dark matter and dark energy.

The video has met with wide acclaim, including from:

Mark Gorenberg - Chair of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Managing Director, Zetta Venture Partners; previously, General Partner, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Robert Millard - Chair Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014-2020, Life Member of the Corporation; four decades in investment banking, aerospace, and defense.

Alan Garber - President of Harvard University. Physician and health economist; Harvard's longest-serving provost; professor at four Harvard schools.

Dan Goldin - Longest-serving Administrator of NASA, 1992-2001. Former Vice President and General Manager, TRW Space and Technology Group.

David Spergel - President of the Simons Foundation, Co-chair of the Roman mission's Science Definition Team, former Chair of Princeton Astrophysics Department.

Asa Hutchinson - Former Governor of Arkansas, Congressman, and U.S. Attorney. Administrator of the DEA; Undersecretary of Homeland Security; 2024 U.S. presidential candidate.

Susan Rockefeller - Award-winning filmmaker, conservationist, and philanthropist. Ocean and sustainable food advocate; founder of Musings.

General David Petraeus - General Partner, KKR; Chairman, KKR Global Institute. Former Director of the CIA; former Commander, and U.S. Central Command.

Adam Aron - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, AMC Entertainment. Former CEO of Vail Resorts, Norwegian Cruise Line, Starwood Hotels, and the Philadelphia 76ers.

Lyndsay Howard - Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to Michael Bloomberg. Former Senior Advisor to Dr. Henry Kissinger; international affairs and diplomacy.

Ezinne Uzo-Okoro - Former Assistant Director for Space Policy, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Senior Fellow, Belfer Center, Harvard Kennedy School; 17 years at NASA.

AIAC Chair L. M. Levie issued the following statement:

"In every age there are those who are told what they may not become, and in every age a few decline to believe it. The counsel given to a girl in Nashville who loved the night sky was neither cruel nor careless. It was the settled wisdom of that hour, offered by reasonable people who believed themselves kind. She heard all of it. She went on looking anyway. History rarely records the moment a barrier gives way; it records only that afterward the barrier was gone.

"Her greatest work was not a discovery but a decision - the decision to spend the better part of a career persuading a republic to build an instrument whose finest hours would arrive long after her own. She asked her country for a mighty telescope that would answer questions no one had yet learned to ask, on behalf of astronomers not yet born, in a language of light that had traveled since before there was an earth to receive it. That is not ambition as we commonly know it. It is the harder and rarer thing: to labor for a harvest one will not live to gather, and to count that sufficient.

"On the thirtieth day of August, from a coast that has sent so much of humanity's curiosity aloft, a rocket rose bearing her name. It carries a wide and patient eye a million miles into the cold, to a still point beyond the moon, and there it will begin to take the measure of what we do not understand - the dark that outweighs the light, the worlds we have not counted, the shape of a universe still opening outward. Some of what it finds we have predicted. The best of what it finds, we have not.

"We do not honor her by placing her upon a pedestal. Pedestals are for those whose work is finished. We honor her by acknowledging the plain fact of what she did: a door had been shut, and she opened it, and she did not close it behind her. Somewhere tonight a child is standing in a yard, looking up at the same glittering sky, wondering whether such a life is permitted to her. It is. That is Nancy Grace Roman's true monument, and it is ours to maintain - for the sky is the inheritance of every soul with the curiosity to look up and the will to go and see."

She Opened the Heavens is available now, free of charge, on YouTube, Vimeo, and LinkedIn.

Premiere at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

She Opened the Heavens was first shown at a full-day meeting devoted to the science of the Roman mission, before an audience of approximately 300 people. Those present were principally scientists working on the mission, joined by family members and guests. The program included a lunch and a reception.

The meeting was led by Dr. Julie McEnery, senior project scientist for the Roman Space Telescope at NASA Goddard, and included an address by Dr. David Spergel, president of the Simons Foundation and co-chair of the mission's Science Definition Team. Dr. Spergel played a significant part in the design of the mission's coronagraph instrument. The screening was met with strong applause, and several of those present approached afterward to express their appreciation for the work.

About Nancy Grace Roman: The Mother of Hubble

Nancy Grace Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 16, 1925, the daughter of a geophysicist and a music teacher. She organized an astronomy club among her schoolmates at the age of eleven. When she sought to major in physics at Swarthmore, the department head told her he ordinarily talked girls out of it - but that she might be the exception. She earned her bachelor's degree there in 1946 and her doctorate in astronomy at the University of Chicago in 1949, where her research on stellar composition carried real implications for how the Milky Way had evolved.

Judging that tenure at a university was effectively closed to a woman of her generation, Roman moved to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and took up radio astronomy. In early 1959, six months after NASA came into existence, she joined the new agency - becoming its first Chief of Astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive post there. Her charge was to build, essentially from nothing, an American program of space-based astronomical observation: the satellites, the pointing systems, the grant structure, and the scientific community to use it all. Under her leadership NASA flew the Orbiting Solar Observatories and four Orbiting Astronomical Observatories, and she championed both the International Ultraviolet Explorer and the Cosmic Background Explorer, whose measurements of the radiation left over from the Big Bang earned its lead scientists the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Her defining work was the campaign for a great telescope above the atmosphere. The idea was not hers alone, but the realization of it was: she convened astronomers and engineers to define what such an instrument should do, then spent years making the case to NASA and to a skeptical Congress, which funded the project in 1977. Her successor as Chief of Astronomy, Edward J. Weiler, gave her the name that stuck - the Mother of Hubble. Roman retired from NASA in 1979 and returned as a consultant, remaining close to the observatory through its launch and its long career. Asked years later which Hubble discovery she found most compelling, she named dark energy - the accelerating expansion of the universe, a phenomenon her own namesake telescope is now built to investigate.

She taught, consulted, and advocated for women in the sciences until her death on December 25, 2018, at the age of 93, leaving a bequest to fund scientific education for girls and women. Of the discouragement she met as a young woman, she said simply that many people had told her a woman could not be an astronomer, and that she was glad she had ignored them.

About the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

NASA renamed the mission - formerly the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, or WFIRST - in her honor in 2020. Built, assembled, and tested at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the observatory carries a 2.4-meter (7.9-foot) primary mirror, the same aperture as Hubble's, paired with a 300-megapixel Wide Field Instrument whose field of view is at least one hundred times larger than Hubble's infrared view. A Roman Coronagraph Instrument will suppress starlight sufficiently to image giant exoplanets directly, demonstrating technology essential to the eventual search for Earth-like worlds.

Roman is designed to answer the questions its namesake found most interesting: the nature of dark energy and dark matter, the census of planets beyond our solar system, and the structure of the infrared universe. Its surveys are expected to yield billions of galaxies, thousands of new exoplanets discovered by microlensing, and the first wide-field maps of the cosmos at Hubble-class resolution, surveying the universe up to a thousand times faster than Hubble.

The observatory launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center on August 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT, and is now on a three-month journey to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2), roughly 930,000 miles from Earth, where it will begin a five-year primary mission. NASA anticipates releasing Roman's first images by early 2027. The launch came some nine months ahead of the mission's formal readiness date of May 2027. The Roman telescope is managed at NASA Goddard with participation by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech/IPAC, and the Space Telescope Science Institute, with principal industrial partners BAE Systems Inc., L3Harris Technologies, and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, and contributions from ESA, JAXA, CNES, and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Aboard the spacecraft is a chip inscribed with more than 1.35 million names submitted by the public - a small crowd of well-wishers riding to L2 with her.

For Further Information

On Nancy Grace Roman

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman

• https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nancy-grace-roman-the-mother-of-hubble

• https://roman.ipac.caltech.edu/page/nancy-grace-roman

• https://esahubble.org/about/history/the-mother-of-hubble/

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nancy-Grace-Roman

• https://www.space.com/39923-mother-of-hubble-nancy-grace-roman.html

• https://www.npr.org/transcripts/680994535

Videos

• NASA's First Chief Astronomer, the Mother of Hubble (NASA Goddard, featuring Dr. Roman in her own words): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5fC3FIUngk

• NASA Names Upcoming Telescope to Honor the "Mother of Hubble" (NASA Scientific Visualization Studio): https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13608/

• Hubblecast 113: Nancy Roman - The Mother of Hubble (ESA/Hubble): https://esahubble.org/videos/hubblecast113a/

• Meet the "Mother of Hubble," Nancy Grace Roman (NASA): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a1k20VSmOf8

• NASA Scientific Visualization Studio archive: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12845

On the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and its launch

• Mission home page: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/

• Roman launch countdown: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/roman-launch-countdown/

• NASA launch briefing announcement: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-to-host-media-briefing-on-roman-telescope-launching-next-month/

• Roman mission blog: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/

• Space Telescope Science Institute: https://www.stsci.edu/roman

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope

• Live launch coverage: https://www.nasa.gov/live

About American Industrial Acquisition Corporation

American Industrial Acquisition Corporation (AIAC) is a diversified industrial group with manufacturing, distribution, and administrative sites in 24 countries across North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia-New Zealand. AIAC has acquired and grown non-core subsidiaries and divisions of Boeing, Siemens, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Johnson Controls, Merck, Pfizer, Astellas, Visteon, Carlyle, KKR, Ahlstrom, Novelis, Tolko, Groupe Suez, Groupe Rexel, and many other leading multinational corporations.

AIAC companies serve companies and governmental entities worldwide in all major sectors, including aviation, space, defense, automotive, truck, rail, marine, petrochemical, solar, nuclear, civil engineering, logistics, agriculture, infrastructure, commercial construction, mining, dredging, disaster relief, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. AIAC companies are also exclusive, authorized distributors of leading branded industrial products, and serve as critical suppliers for the construction of major airports, schools, hospitals, performing arts and sports centers, offices, and hotels throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. AIAC is a major manufacturer of greenhouse materials globally and of building, street, and highway signage in Europe, and a distributor of electrical products throughout France.

AIAC companies actively support exploration into outer space, manufacturing critical components for launching and propelling spacecraft and satellites. AIAC customers in this sector include NASA, SpaceX, the European Space Agency, Blue Origin, and Boeing. AIAC companies also lead in the design and manufacture of undersea umbilical cables for worldwide oceanographic research.

Of note, AIAC purchased Boeing Canada in 2005 and has produced over 10,000 unique components for every Boeing jet plane ever since, reliably serving Boeing from manufacturing facilities in North America. A leader in ultra-high precision jet engine component manufacturing, AIAC companies produce 2,200 fan blades for each jet engine produced by GE, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, and Honeywell.

AIAC companies produce the critical automotive wire and cable for Tesla, GM, Ford, Chrysler-Fiat, Toyota, and Nissan, and for the New York and Atlanta subways. In connection with its kraft paper manufacturing interests in Canada and the United States, AIAC sustainably manages 22 million acres of Manitoba, Canada forestland, an area equivalent in size to the nation of Hungary. AIAC affiliate Metallwarenfabrik Gemmingen GmbH, located in Germany, designs, manufactures, and distributes high performance, emergency portable power generators used in global conflict zones and during major natural disasters.

For further information, see: www.aiac.com

About AIAC Philanthropies

AIAC and the AIAC Foundation support a wide range of nonprofit, nonsectarian, bipartisan organizations which promote international conflict resolution, disaster relief, economic development, environmental sustainability, exploration, and the performing arts. The exploration-focused nonprofit organizations they actively support include The Explorers Club, the National Geographic Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, Mission Blue, the Jane Goodall Institute, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium, the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Space Society, and the United States Space Foundation.

AIAC Chairman L. M. Levie is a Member of the Board of Trustees of The Explorers Club, its Poet Laureate, and a Member of its Annual Dinner Committee. AIAC and its affiliates Bradford Space, Canadian Kraft Paper Industries, SuperAlloy Manufacturing Solutions, and Champlain Cable are Partners of The Explorers Club and Sponsors of Oceans Week.

For further information, see: www.aiac.com | aiac.com/our-values

About The Explorers Club

The Explorers Club is an American-based, international, multidisciplinary professional society with the mission of promoting and supporting scientific exploration and field study on land, sea, and in outer space. The club was founded in New York City in 1904 and has served as a meeting point for explorers and scientists worldwide. Members of the club have been the first to explore the North Pole, the South Pole, Mount Everest, and the Mariana Trench, and to walk on the Moon. The club's notable current members and honorees include Buzz Aldrin, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Prince Albert II of Monaco, Princess Reema Bandar Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, Grand Duke Guillaume V of Luxembourg, Sir Richard Branson, Ken Griffin, James Cameron, Ray Dalio, and Wendy Schmidt.

In years past, prominent members have included Sir Ernest Shackleton, President Theodore Roosevelt, Sir Edmund Hillary, Amelia Earhart, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Jim Lovell, Thor Heyerdahl, Walter Cronkite, Prince Philip - Duke of Edinburgh, and Jane Goodall. The Explorers Club's historic clubhouse, at 46 East 70th Street in New York City, is a museum and monument to the "Famous Firsts," the greatest explorers and expeditions of all time.

For further information, see: www.explorers.org

Media Contact

Isabel Carro-Toro, Vice President
American Industrial Acquisition Corporation
+34 689 295 827 (Spain)
+1 787 244 3175 (USA)

[email protected]

# # #