LJK asked:

"Is there a serious proposal for a dedicated Titan mission anywhere?"

There is a lot of interest in doing future Titan work. I've done some aerocapture studies in support of future Titan missions and helped out with some shocktube work concerning CN emission during Titan atmospheric entry. I believe everyone in the community pretty much agrees that Titan is very interesting and worthy of future study. Titan does have a big problem in being so far away. If Prometheus can actually become a working technology then Titan would be a natural objective for a Prometheus type mission. A nuclear powered orbiter would have the necessary power for a synthetic aperature radar study of Titan's surface at high resolution. Such an orbiter would also have the necesary data bandwidth to support sophisticated rover type landers on Titan's surface. A big problem has always been money. Unfortunately, a bigger problem is with NASA in the early phases of being euthanized. It's difficult to develop a long term mission like sending landers to Titan when much of the technical staff are being laid off and the basic engineering capability scattered to the four winds. Private corporations like Lockheed-Martin do not maintain staff for technologies that are not actively funded, e.g. hypersonics, interplanetary atmospheric entry, etc. Historically these technologies have been preserved at NASA or by the dark-side of the profession, e.g. Sandia. When Sandia was part of Bell Telephone, they were pretty good about maintaining core competence and acting as a backup for NASA. However since being bought up by Lockheed-Martin, Sandia has been cut back to the bone. In the meantime, much of the capability at NASA has been cut way back. At the rate things are going, the basic technical ability to design aeroshells for atmospheric entry will have been erased. Many billions of dollars were spent developing this technology mainly in support of ICBM reenty vehicles.

Gary