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.

I hope it isn't delayed too much. I want to see a nuclear-powered drone on Titan, and a decade is already a long wait!