Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch NASA’s groundbreaking Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, using a Falcon Heavy rocket. Scheduled to lift off between July 5 and 25, 2028, from Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the launch contract is valued at $256.6 million.
This mission, part of NASA’s New Frontiers Programme, will cost $3.35 billion and aims to explore Titan’s unique environment with a drone-like rotorcraft lander.
Dragonfly will travel to Titan over six years, arriving in 2034. It will explore Titan’s methane seas, icy landscapes, and organic-rich dunes, landing in a new location every Titan day (16 Earth days). The rotorcraft will collect samples and analyse Titan’s prebiotic chemistry, searching for biosignatures of life, whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based. Titan, the only known celestial body besides Earth with stable surface liquids, presents a unique opportunity to study environments that may support life.
Originally planned for a 2026 launch, the mission was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. NASA chose SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy to shorten the cruise phase and meet the 2034 arrival target.
While Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity make it ideal for rotorcraft flight, the moon’s surface receives only 1 per cent of the sunlight that Earth does. This creates challenges for solar-powered operations, which Dragonfly will tackle using advanced autonomous systems, drawing lessons from the Mars Helicopter, Ingenuity.
Dragonfly follows the legacy of the Cassini-Huygens mission, which in 2005 provided humanity’s first close-up look at Titan. Cassini-Huygens revealed a world shaped by methane rivers, ancient shorelines, and ice. Dragonfly will expand on those discoveries by exploring Titan’s active methane cycle and studying how water and carbon-rich materials may have interacted to create prebiotic conditions.
The mission is managed by NASA’s Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, with contributions from experts worldwide in planetary science, rotorcraft design, and autonomous systems. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre oversees the project as part of the New Frontiers Programme.
