Artist rendering of Dragonfly soaring
over Titan’s surface

According to a new NASA inspector general report issued today, NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan is now billions overbudget and is likely not be ready to launch in 2028.

You can download the report here [pdf]. From its executive summary:

Dragonfly was selected under a New Frontiers Announcement of Opportunity with a $850 million cost cap on Principal Investigator-Managed Mission Costs, which primarily includes development costs but excludes launch vehicle and post-launch operations costs. However, by April 2024, those costs had grown to $2.6 billion and the launch delayed by more than 2 years, from April 2026 to July 2028. The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing APL to conduct four replans between June 2019 and July 2023 early in Dragonfly’s development. Justifications for these replans included the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, changes to accommodate a heavy-lift launch vehicle, projected funding challenges, and inflation.

The report now estimates the budget will eventually rise above $3 billion, cost that is eating away at NASA’s entire planetary budget, making other missions impossible. The project itself is far from ready, with multiple unfinished issues that make its present launch target of 2028 very unlikely.

In April 2025, the Standing Review Board … identified multiple areas of concern, to include performance and delivery concerns for critical instruments (e.g., DraMS and DrACO), an integration and testing schedule that appears unable to accommodate late deliveries of instruments, and several designs still not finalized. As of June 2025, the project’s top risks (those with a high probability of occurrence and/or a high consequence to the mission) include lander thermal performance, the lander fuselage panel schedule, fatigue failure of critical flight components, and MMRTG endurance survivability.

None of this is a surprise. When NASA first announced this mission to Titan in 2019, I immediately predicted it:

I hate to throw cold water on this magnificent and ambitious mission, but I will not be at all surprised if it ends up costing more than expected and ends up getting delayed. NASA’s track record in the past decade with big projects on the cutting edge, as this appears to be, has been abysmal. Worse, I have seen little at NASA to make me thing any of this has changed enough to ease my mind for the next decade.

Nor will the recommendations of this inspector general report change anything. The recommendations are all window-dressing that can be summed up in on shallow phrase: “Do better!”

Based on NASA’s endless management failures on numerous projects, “Do better!” won’t cut it. In fact, even today NASA’s management demonstrated its dishonesty and incompetence by posting a press release lauding the wonderful state of the project, as if all the problems mentioned in the inspector general report did not exist.

This project now looks like it will become another Webb Space Telescope, costing $10 billion (20x its original budget) and flying more a decade behind schedule. And I am being very optimistic about this final cost and schedule.