Will The United Nations Outer Space Treaty and Its Members Save Titan FromNASA’s Interplanetary…

Will The United Nations Outer Space Treaty and Its Members Save Titan FromNASA’s Interplanetary Plutonium Disposal and Contamination?

NASA made headlines at the end of April 2025 when it announced that its Dragonfly mission to Titan, an icy moon orbiting Saturn, had received final approval. This mission will launch in 2028. Dragonfly is a 12-foot-long quadcopter weighing one ton that’s powered by a thermoelectric generator containing 4 kilograms of plutonium-238. Electricity produced by the plutonium is stored in lithium batteries.

The Plutonium Powered Dragonfly Helicopter

Dragonfly’s Plutonium-238 Powered Thermoelectric Generator

The purpose of this article is to raise the reader’s awareness about the disparity between NASA’s planned use and disposal of plutonium on Titan and the US’ obligations under the United Nations Outer Space Treaty. The Treaty and its terms are a legally binding contract between the US and the 115 other nations that signed the Treaty. As part of the contract’s performance terms, all Outer Space Treaty members agreed to comply with Article 9. Article 9 states that “space exploration shall be conducted in a manner that avoids causing the harmful contamination of the Moon and other celestial bodies.” Titan is one of the celestrial bodies that fall under the Outer Space Treaty’s jurisdiction.

Besides agreeing to uphold Article 9's interplanetary environmental protection mandate, Treaty members legally committed themselves to conducting space exploration with due regard for the interests of all nations.

Contrary to the Treaty’s terms, NASA’s Dragonfly mission will use and dispose of highly radioactive plutonium-238 on Titan. The Dragonfly mission is a high risk undertaking with a high probability of catastrophic failure. The mission does not avoid causing harmful contamination, nor does it show due regard for the codified interests of other Treaty members. The Moon and all other celestial bodies being defined in the Outer Space Treaty as the province of all mankind. You, I, and everyone else on Earth have a legally vested interest in each celestial body.

The Dragonfly mission will use the phenomenally hazardous man-made element, plutonium-238, to produce heat and electricity. Unlike nuclear weapons plutonium-239 that if manufactured by irradiating uranium in a nuclear reactor, plutonium-238 undergoes two cycles of nuclear reactor irradiation. The double irradiation cycle and chemical refining makes plutonium-238 so radioactive that it glows red-hot with a temperature exceeding 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,000°F).

A NASA Plutonium-238 Pellet

Plutonium-238 was chosen as Dragonfly’s nuclear fuel not only to produce electricity. The heat that plutonium-238 generates keep the spacecraft’s electronics, computers, and batteries from freezing. Plutonium-238 produces so much heat that Dragonfly has exhaust fans to prevent the craft from overheating deep space, where the temperature is -280 degrees centigrade.

Plutonium-238's intense radioactive decay heat makes the Dragonfly mission possible, but it’s also inseparably connected to its planetary scale environmental risks. Dragonfly’s 4 kilograms of plutonium-238 emits the same amount of radioactivity per second as 96,000,000 kilograms of naturally occurring uranium. Each kilogram of plutonium-238 emits the same amount of radioactivity as 24,000 tons of uranium. The Rossing uranium mine shown below, began operating in 1975 and produces 3,000 tons of uranium per year.

The 3,000 Ton/Year Rossing Uranium Mine in Namibia.

The Dragonfly mission’s threat to Titan is akin to a science fiction movie. A smog-like haze shrouds Titan, and hidden beneath its atmosphere is an 200 kilometer deep ocean with a 50-kilometer-thick ice shell. Titan’s ocean contains ten times more water than all the oceans on Earth combined.

Clues indicating biological activity in Titan's ocean is that its atmosphere, like the atmosphere in Earth, is nitrogen and carbon-rich, with methane (CH4) concentrations between 2% and 5%. The abundance of carbon (C), hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), and nitrogen (N) on Titan’s surface deserves careful consideration and respect. Those four elements comprise 98% of the human body and are the main constituents of all life on Earth.

The source of Titan’s methane (CH4) is subterranean, but the process producing it has not been determined. The prevailing hypothesis is that Titan’s methane is being produced by microorganisms living in its ocean. Until proven otherwise, a conservative conclusion is that Titan’s constantly renewing methane is due to its ocean is teeming with extraterrestrial life.

Methane reaches Titan’s surface through high-pressure cryovolcanic eruptions and seeps containing a mixture of water, methane, and ammonia. Due to Titan’s ambient -180 degrees Celsius temperature, methane on its surface condenses into liquid, forming lakes and seas.

LNG Tanker

Titan’s methane takes the same form as the liquid natural gas (LNG) that’s produced on Earth and transported in refrigerated ships. In the future, Titan’s LNG resources, which are hundreds of times larger than Earth’s hydrocarbon reserves, could sustain fuel cell or fusion-powered space stations orbiting Saturn. If NASA contaminates Titan with plutonium, future generations' space exploration choices could be taken away. The potential loss of future access to Titan due to high level plutonium contamination caused by NASA is an intergenerational human rights issue. Titan’s status as part of the “province of all mankind” means that Titan’s contamination would be an international intergenerational human rights issue impacting all of humanity.

On Titan, the conditions and temperature are such that methane forms a hydrological cycle similar to the water cycle on Earth. On Titan, however, the rain, rivers, and seas are composed of liquid methane, not water. Titan’s surface is actively eroded, flooded, and reshaped by liquid methane. Flowing liquid methane on Titan poses a contamination transportion and dispersement risk for the plutonium-238 that NASA plans to discard there.

The alleged basis for NASA $3.5 billion Dragonfly mission is its claim that Titan’s “prebiotic organic chemistry” should be studied due to its similarity to Earth more than 4 billion years ago. The flaw in NASA’s statement is that its use of the phrase “prebiotic chemistry” to describe Titan is prejudicially implying, without evidence, that life doesn’t exist there. Contrary to NASA’s prebiotic assumption, Titan’s atmosphere is constantly being renewed with methane, and the source of that methane appears to be life that’s thriving in its ocean.

An alternative geological interpretation that contradicts NASA’s unsubstantiated prebiotic narrative is that Titan’s methane is biological in origin. Furthermore, the biological methane hypothesis is based on the assertion that Titan has more in common with the “Snowball Earth” era of Earth’s history than its prebiotic Hadean Eon. The Hadean was 4.6 billion to 4 billion years ago.

Snowball Earth, also known as the Cryogenian, began approximately 720 million years ago and lasted for approximately 85 million years. The most frequently cited theory for why the Cryogenian ended (635 million years ago) is that methane gas accumulated beneath Earth’s frozen oceans and was released in a sudden burp. The massive release of climate changing methane that is believed to have accompanied the end of the Snowball Earth era turned Earth into a hot greenhouse.

Before the Cryogenian, life on Earth was limited to simple, microscopic organisms and algae. However, less than 100 million years after the Snowball Earth era ended, large, complex organisms with eyes, brains, muscles, nervous systems, digestive tracts, and bilatteral symetry appeared, colonizing every marine biological niche.

By 550 to 520 million years ago, the 9 major Animal Kingdom phyla that currently dominate Earth’s biosphere were firmly established and thriving in the oceans. Examples of complex, multicellular organisms that evolved at lightening speed after Snowball Earth and still exist today include sponges, flatworms, roundworms, shellfish, segmented worms, jellyfish, and sea anemones. Free-swimming, predatory trilobites which existed 530 million years ago went extinct 280 million years later.

Earth’s 9 Major Animal Kindom Phyla

Snowball Earth’s extreme conditions triggered a survival-of-the-fittest, genetic selection process that created Earth’s current diversity of life, including humans. Humbling proof of our own simple origin is that 70% of the human genome, or 14,000 genes, are shared with acorn worms.

Acorn worms emerged in the aftermath of Snowball Earth and first appeared in the fossil record approximately 540 million years ago. The time span between Earth’s very brief prebiotic period and the development of the acorn worm was approximately 4 billion years.

The ability of NASA’s Dragonfly mission to contaminate large portions of Titan with highly radioactive plutonium-238 raises serious ethical questions. Extraterrestrial life which is assumed to exist on Titan, has the same God given right to develop without harmful human interference as life on Earth had billions of years ago.

Titan’s enormous methane emissions point to a thriving subsurface ocean community, and until proven otherwise, Titan should be protected as a cradle of life sanctuary. Ethically it is unacceptable that NASA’s planned disposal of high-level plutonium waste on Titan could cause genetic mutations that undo billions of years of evolution. NASA’s plutonium disposal on Titan fail to anticipate future evolutionary changes on that celestial body, that could be similar to those that occurred on Earth after the Snowball Earth thawed.

Ultimately, the issue comes down to this, “Plutonium-powered aircraft are so dangerous to life that their use on Earth is prohibited, so why is NASA going to use one on Titan? The bottom line is that NASA is saying that humans are superior and extraterrestrial life does not matter.

Humanity has been an interstellar society since Voyager 1 left the Solar System in 2012. Our journey to attaining interstellar status began billions of years ago with our microscopic ancestors who inhabited Earth’s oceans. Why life in Titan’s oceans must be protected is that Humans prove, with enough time, microorganisms can evolve into an interstellar society. On Titan, a future interstellar society could be lost due to plutonium contamination. Humanity will only get one chance to do what is right.

NASA’s contamination of Titan with plutonium goes beyond genocide. It could alter the natural evolutionary process and prevent the development of intelligent life and a future interstellar society. As an intelligent species that evolved from microorganisms in Earth’s early oceans, Humans more than any other species, have the ability to understand and appreciate the importance of protecting microscopic life in Titan’s ocean.

Over time, microscopic marine life on Titan could evolve into sentient beings capable of sending spacecraft to other star systems. Titan is an incubator that could give birth to a future interstellar society, and it may have already done so in the past. If humanity does not protect possible life on Titan, then it seems possible that other interstellar societies will.