'Dragonfly' Mission to Saturn's Moon Titan: Behind Schedule, Overbudget, Says NASA Inspector General (nasa.gov) 30
After its six-year journey to Saturn's moon Titan, Dragonfly's rotorcraft lander "will fly like a large drone," explains its web page, spending three years sampling multiple landing sites to characterize Titan's habitability and look for "precursors of the origin of life."
"However, the project has undergone multiple replans impacting cost and schedule, resulting in a life-cycle cost increase of nearly $1 billion and over 2 years of delays," according to an announcement from NASA's Inspector General.
From the Inspector General's report: The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing [Johns Hopkins University] Applied Physics Laboratory 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."
But its higher-than-expected life-cycle cost over $3 billion "will continue to absorb an increasing proportion of the Planetary Science Division's total budget," meaning Dragonfly's increased cost (and "additional budget constraints") have "contributed to a gap of at least 12 years in New Frontiers [planetary science] mission launches, and will jeopardize future priorities outlined in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's (National Academies) decadal surveys."
Yet a NASA press release notes the mission "has cleared several key design, development and testing milestones and remains on track toward launch in July 2028." Its software-defined radio has been completed, and the part of the spectrometer which analyzes Titan's chemical components for "potentially biologically relevant" compounds (as well as structural and thermal testing of the lander's insulation).
"The mission is scheduled to launch in July 2028 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for spotting this news on the space/science blog "Behind the Black".
From the Inspector General's report: The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing [Johns Hopkins University] Applied Physics Laboratory 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."
But its higher-than-expected life-cycle cost over $3 billion "will continue to absorb an increasing proportion of the Planetary Science Division's total budget," meaning Dragonfly's increased cost (and "additional budget constraints") have "contributed to a gap of at least 12 years in New Frontiers [planetary science] mission launches, and will jeopardize future priorities outlined in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's (National Academies) decadal surveys."
Yet a NASA press release notes the mission "has cleared several key design, development and testing milestones and remains on track toward launch in July 2028." Its software-defined radio has been completed, and the part of the spectrometer which analyzes Titan's chemical components for "potentially biologically relevant" compounds (as well as structural and thermal testing of the lander's insulation).
"The mission is scheduled to launch in July 2028 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida."
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for spotting this news on the space/science blog "Behind the Black".
Such a cool mission, I don't care what it costs. (Score:2)
A quad copter on Titan would be amazing. I don't mind if the cost goes up a lot, its well worth it.
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100% agree. It will be fucking amazing. Titan is amazing. Can't wait to see close-up images of ice and liquid oceans on another planet.
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*another moon I mean .. well Titan is kinda like a planet. More of a planet than Pluto.
*ducks*
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It cost to much because NASA is a top heavy bloated bureaucracy, not because of the mission costs. We'd have a lot more space exploration if upper class people weren't getting richer off of poor people's taxes.
Re:Such a cool mission, I don't care what it costs (Score:4)
The NASA employees aren't getting rich. The director of NASA makes about as much as a moderately experienced researcher in an industry lab, and the rest of the pay scale is far below industry standards. There IS a huge bureaucracy but a lot of that is demanded by the public in order to ensure that there is no "waste", even though the bureaucracy itself IS the waste.
I worked for many years at a DOE lab and the fraud protections meant that everything required N levels of approval - often by people with no knowledge of what was being done. Now that I'm at an industry lab, I can pretty much buy whatever I need for research and presumably if I spend money inefficiently or on inappropriate things I'll get fired. Its far more efficient.
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The top people at NASA are making big six figure salaries like all the top people. The top salary employees are overpaid, the bottom wage earners are underpaid. Two wrongs don't make it right. Not to even mention benefits and pensions. Now, let's take about the private subcontractors and their salaries, shall we? Or the wealth of the shareholders.
What I see is a classist ineffective bureaucracy feeding greedy industry. Which is why we don't have a real rotating space station, orbital assembly platforms and
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Do you think high 6 figure salaries are unreasonable? In technical fields, the best people are far more productive than the average people so it makes economic sense to pay what it takes to employ them. In any case NASA salaries are far (2x-3x) below industry for similar skills.
I agree that there is a huge bureaucracy problem, but like all bureaucracies, its difficult to decide what parts to eliminate. My experience is DOE, but I expect its similar. Environment Safety and Health represented a huge expen
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What la Presidenta wants is to zero out the NASA budget. He'll funnel the money to private enterprises with a bit-O-grift off the top for his for his time and trouble.
What about Science, you say? la Presidenta doesn't believe the word should even exist. If you want to see his attitude towards selling off the federal government, look at his comments when someone asked him about deals whereby the government gets a cut. His response, I paraphrase (but not by much): some people are really dumb, they want someth
Re:Same old, same old. (Score:4, Informative)
It's the price of innovation.
When you're planning a mission like this, you're not just building the probe, you're inventing it. It's basically impossible to make accurate budget and timing predictions, there's no way to avoid development dead ends that need a "back to the white board" reset.
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I don't think it's entirely that. It may be for things like NASA projects where innovation is much more prevalent, but there are other factors in Government projects as a whole. I suspect there's a large element of costs and time frames being deliberately underestimated. If the true costs were stated up front it may be more difficult politically to get something approved. HS2 here in the UK seems to be an example of that. The originally stated costs and time frame were ridiculously low and have risen steepl
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I'm not sure what the difference would be in one-off missions. It's not like you're going to mass produce Titan probes.
R&D will still need to prototype several iterations, the final one being the golden copy.
Software defined radio? (Score:2)
On the face of it, a software-defined radio seems like adding unnecessary complexity to a system that, if it fails, would end the mission. Is there a reason a software-defined radio is a good thing - or perhaps a necessary thing - for this mission?
We know how to make simple, dependable radios - we've been doing it for 150 years.
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The mission is very bandwidth limited, there is no orbiter, they have to direct-to-earth transmission with a small antenna .(at least that was the case when I last saw it). So they want to maximize data transmission efficiency per transmit power.
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It's too late to make any change in the mission, the only options at this time are 1. launch mission or 2. cancel mission. It's not like SDR hasn't been used in space before.
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Right, I get that. It's just that when I read about a mission that's over cost and behind schedule, the first thing I tend to look for is unnecessary complexity used for its own sake - because that's often an indication of poor planning and decision-making.
Cost overruns common? (Score:4, Interesting)
Has NASA done anything of note on time and within budget lately?
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Does NASA set it's own budget or mission directives? They're a particular agency that gets tossed around like a hot potato "The Senate: go build SLS and you have to do it this way." "Oh by the way we have a new President so we are slashing your budgets and not giving you what you requested".
Things are not so simple. That said if anyone is a Republican why would you trust the numbers of Inspector Generals when we have DOGE? DOGE exists because the admin said the IG's and GAO are all corrupt and useless so
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No they don't set their budget and no they don't (necessarily) control their own mission directives. But they do eventually settle on a mission and they have a budget. Even if those things can change abruptly.
They had 8 uninterrupted years of the Obama administratrion not too long ago. How many of their projects from that era were on-time and within budget? That should give us some perspective on whether there's anything particularly notable about the Dragonfly mission.
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Sure but even Obama can't be judged as an isolated thing, he inherited the Constellation program from Bush for manned spaceflight which was the first SLS successor and exactly the type of Congressional overbudget underfunded half-measure that NASA both participates in and is subject to, hell we are still living in that programs shadow 20 years later as that's where Orion and SLS were spawned from. I'm just saying this kindof broad attack on NASA as it operates is imo an imcomplete way to view things.
Also t
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Why? We aren't (necessarily) paying tax dollars on that. They answer to their investors.