NASA inspector general: Dragonfly mission is vastly overbudget and behind schedule
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.
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Just SMH. This is why we can’t have nice things.
They should just hire Elon Musk to get the job done.
Project is run by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) under Nasa Goddard in Maryland. Fire them and permanently close Nasa Goddard.
I have complicated feelings about this. Because on the one hand, Dragonfly is easily the NASA planetary science mission with the highest *cool* factor, going to (in my opinion) the most intriguing world in the Solar System not named “Earth” — I mean, it’s a nuclear powered drone that’s going to zip through the hydrocarbon skies of Titan!
But, on the other hand, Dragonfly’s budget has exploded to full-on flagship mission levels, and the schedule delays have piled up. Even coolness has to justify the tax dollars spent on it.
The first thing that has to be said is that we have known about all these cost and schedule problems since the spring (April 21) of 2024. What this NASA IG report does is to finally break down the reasons *why* this happened, and try to recommend how to improve matters. (Which, as Bob says, NASA will mostly ignore.)
The second thing is, for all the issues that APL and Goddard have . . . it has to be said that a lot of the blame for this was for reasons beyond the control of Elizabeth Turtle (the PI) and APL First, Covid trashed its supply chains, and then the Bidenflation that followed jacked up the real dollar costs. Second, NASA HQ forced the Dragonfly team to do at least four “replans” of the mission, each of which of course jacked up costs, too. One of the engineers working on Dragonfly posted a comment at the NSF forums at the time, explaining what he had seen:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=48430.msg2635092#msg2635092
So yes, it was also a very ambitious mission with some challenging TRL’s, and that created its own risks for cost and schedule issues. And then you add on all the extrinsic factors noted previously…
At the time, I also had a back-and-forth with Dwayne Day about this. Dwayne’s sense was that Tom Zurbuchen (then NASA science director) pretty much knew that Dragonfly was going to blow out its New Frontiers budget cap. He approved it anyway because he thought the tech and the science of the mission would justify it. Quote: “I have my suspicions that Thomas Zurbuchen picked Dragonfly knowing that it was likely to blow through its budget, but maintaining budget goals was not what he ultimately cared about, he cared about doing exciting, ambitious science.” Well, there is no question that Dragonfly is going to do exciting, ambitious science,, but it strikes me as being rather dishonest to greenlight a medium-class science mission which you just know is going to mutate into a de facto flagship-level mission, even without a pandemic. It is certainly not the first time the NASA science mission directorate has done such a thing, but it’s certainly one of the most brazen cases of it.
Dwayne also made the point that NASA is, alas, not unique in frequently underestimated life cycle costs of a development program; DoD (er, the War Department) is replete with such things. We all know that. But that is cold comfort, I’m afraid.
I want Dragonfly to be completed and get to Titan (before I die). But NASA is overdue for a serious reform of how it does science missions.
The words “nuclear” and “cheap” will never go together, no matter how badly fiscal hawks want them to.
You either fund American Exceptionalism or you don’t.
In a debate I am sure you all remember Rick Perry was searching for words to describe the agency he thought was wasteful.
Ron Paul suggested either EPA or the Dept. of Education (even Bill Maher sees that as waste).
Perry was thinking DoE, forgetting they handle nukes. It was after that boneheaded idea that he went to wearing glasses so he would look smarter.
Didn’t work
Hi Jeff,
Yes, Dragonfly will have an RTG, and yes, there is no way we could do this mission on Titan without one.
But that was baked in from the beginning. The RTG hasn’t been a factor in the cost increases of this mission over the last six years. It’s been a constant.