WASHINGTON — Citing budget uncertainty, NASA is pushing back the launch of the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan by a year and postponing a key milestone in its development.
In a presentation at a Nov. 28 meeting of NASA’s Outer Planets Assessment Group (OPAG), Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, said agency leadership decided to postpone formal confirmation of the mission earlier this month, a milestone where the agency sets an official cost and schedule for the mission.
The delay in confirmation by NASA’s Agency Program Management Council (APMC), she said, is based on uncertainty about how much money will be available for the mission and other parts of NASA’s planetary science portfolio given broader budget pressures on the agency. “Because of these incredibly large uncertainties in FY ’24 and FY ’25 funding and budgets, the decision was made at that APMC to postpone the official confirmation,” she said.
Instead, the APMC will reconvene after the release of the agency’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal in early 2024. “We anticipate taking Dragonfly back to APMC in the spring” for a decision on confirmation, she said. In the meantime, though, NASA will allow the mission to proceed with some elements of final mission design and fabrication that usually do not start until after the confirmation review.
NASA requested $327.7 million for Dragonfly in fiscal year 2024, which was 18% less than what the mission received in 2023 but, the agency said at the time, would keep the mission on schedule to meet a launch readiness date of June 2027. Project officials warned in May that the requested funding was below what they estimated was needed and that they were “evaluating cost and schedule options” for the mission.
Glaze said at the OPAG meeting that a “replan” of the mission by the project team over the summer, using a revised budget profile, led to a new launch readiness date of July…
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