NASA officially greenlights $3.35B mission to Saturn's moon Titan | Hacker News Reader

NASA officially greenlights $3.35B mission to Saturn's moon Titan

arstechnica.com

36 pointsLinuxBender12 comments

"When NASA chose Dragonfly in 2019, the mission had a cost cap of $850 million ($1 billion when adjusted for inflation) to get it to the launch pad. The budget limit didn't include the launch or costs to operate the Dragonfly spacecraft after launch. The costs originally under the budget cap have increased the $1 billion post-inflation figure to $2.1 billion, according to NASA."

Unfortunately, some industries experience much more inflation than others.

That's nothing compared to JWST which increased in cost from $500M to $10B. They've fixed some of the issues that led to that, but not all...

Official post: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/dragonfly/nasas-dragonfly-...

Incredibly exciting mission, Titan has a dense nitrogen atmosphere and lakes of hydrocarbons. It's very cold, but it is a very interesting object to visit in terms of size, atmosphere, gravity, and organic chemicals.

Sorry to bring down the mood, but doesn't this mean that best case, in a decade, we can say there may be life? I feel like I've been hearing that my entire life. Shouldn't we drill into the ocean?

The ingredients to make the most basic form of life are well known. It will of course be a huge discovery if we can detect life on another object other than earth, maybe the biggest discovery in lifetime, but I think it will be a one time news event without much of a follow up. Much more interesting would be to detect signs of intelligence life in solar systems that we can observe with high resolution.

> NASA's budgetary limitations, and not any mismanagement from within the Dragonfly project, were responsible for a large share of the cost growth

Can anyone translate?

Anyone know of any open positions related to the mission? (Software)

They should be investing in reusable launch systems.

Why?

But thats totally unrelated? This isn't about a rocket, this is whats on the rocket.

Also its basically a helicopter, so it is a reusable system.

It's also about 3.35B dollars.

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