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Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI
New Horizons revealed Pluto to be a marvelously complex world.
In July of 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, a tiny world on the outskirts of our solar system. The encounter, though fleeting, made history.
But the behind-the-scenes struggle to get there, rife with power plays and political ploys, began a quarter-century earlier.
“Chasing New Horizons—Inside The Epic First Mission To Pluto” (Picador, 295 pages) chronicles the cancellations, false starts, stop-works, snafus, and ultimate success of a journey that many believed was doomed to fail.
In separate interviews, I spoke with co-authors Alan Stern, the principal investigator for New Horizons, and David Grinspoon, the astrobiologist and author. They described the enormous, sometimes excruciating task to get a three-billion-mile mission off the ground. Here are excerpts from our conversations.
BILL RETHERFORD: New Horizons sounds like the project that almost never happened.
ALAN STERN: It was a long and tortured trail. If the mission to Pluto were a cat, it would’ve been dead long ago, because a cat only has nine lives. If someone made a movie about it, nobody would believe it.
There was a long period, from about 1990 to 2003, when a year wouldn’t go by without the mission getting canceled or facing some threat. People would tell me to quit. But if we had done that, we wouldn’t be talking on the phone today, would we?
DAVID GRINSPOON: Alan lived this story and I followed it closely for decades. So many times I remember thinking, ‘God, these guys on this Pluto mission, it’s just crazy what they’re going through.’ It was unreal. It was like a monster movie where the monster keeps getting killed and keeps coming back to life.
I think a lot of people interested in space exploration tend to hear stories about the great missions, how they work technically, what we learned. But they don’t really hear the story of what it takes to get a mission from scratch to the launch pad and into space. And what it takes is a lot of maneuvering and responding and scheming to deal with the political threats.
That’s partly why we wanted to tell this story. To show people how the sausage is made. I’m a big fan of NASA. I don’t want to be critical of an organization that does some of the most magical, wonderful projects happening today. They do amazing stuff. But the reality of how it happens is just more complicated, like everything in life.
Credit: NASA
Four months before launch, the New Horizons spacecraft gets checked out.
BR: All along the way, some NASA scientists and administrators thought the mission wasn’t justified. What was their problem with Pluto?
AS: It would take nine-and-a-half years just to get to Pluto. If you are 55 in 1990, in mid-to-late career, and talking about a mission that was ultimately 25 years away—you might live to see it, but you might not benefit from it career-wise, because you would be retired. That’s a normal human tendency. It’s understandable. But it really was a barrier.
DG: People thought it was just so darn far away. Why should we put resources into this place when we don’t know if we can even get there? And there was a mindset that Pluto was just a curiosity, an oddball outlier—not something to help us piece together the story of the solar system. We might travel a decade to get there and then find out it’s some battered iceball that doesn’t tell us anything interesting.
BR: To offer just one example of all the fits and starts—in 2002, the Bush administration suddenly canceled the mission right after NASA approved it.
AS: That was surreal. Only two-and-a-half months after I got the phone call that we won, the Bush administration zeroed the money on the Pluto budget. The reason they gave was that it was overbudget. But I didn’t have a contract. You can’t be overbudget if you didn’t spend anything. We didn’t have a budget to be over.
DG: The contract hadn’t even been signed. Either it was a bureaucratic mistake or some machination by somebody in the OMB who really didn’t like the Pluto mission. Barbara Mikulski, the senator from Maryland, stepped in and got them to provide some emergency bridge funding while it got reconsidered.
It was crazy because the New Horizons team had to keep working. They didn’t have that long to design and build the spacecraft. The launch window could not be delayed. If they didn’t make the launch window, they couldn’t go to Pluto in their lifetimes. So they kept working while the funding was in doubt and the politics were worked out. It’s a strange way to start a spacecraft project. Just one of the weird episodes in this whole saga.
Credit: NASA
New Horizons takes off for Pluto from Cape Canaveral, January 19 2006.
BR: In turn, the scientists who favored a Pluto mission stuck together—and became insurgents, almost subversives.
DG: Yes, there was definitely a subversive quality to it. A small band of committed scientists going up against an older, more conservative establishment who didn’t understand the attraction of this far out dream.
That opposition cemented the bonds of those team members—the Plutophiles—who ultimately became the New Horizons team. The Plutophiles were in their twenties and thirties when they started out. Alan was a grad student, in his late twenties, when he first raised the idea of a Pluto mission.
BR: What was that like?
AS: At NASA, you can’t just walk in with a good idea and rise to the top. You have to get through a series of committees. There are ten times as many good ideas as there is money, so the process is steep and selective. We spent a lot of time making presentations, educating people who didn’t know anything about Pluto. They didn’t know how interesting it was.
But the project took so long, the personalities kept changing—the people in charge would change, and you would have to start all over. It became a bit of a maze, to get through all that.
DG: Alan and his compatriots were very strategic. They realized they needed to create a movement. They recruited people and drummed up interest so NASA would get a sense that people were clamoring for a mission. They got people to be as vocal as possible. Back then, it was all about writing letters. There was a letter-writing campaign in the professional community--and in the larger community of people excited about space exploration. The Planetary Society urged their members to write. And they did.
Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI
Pluto, with its moon, Charon. Although relative sizes are correct, separation is not to scale.
BR: It must have been something, in January 2006, to see New Horizons finally about to launch.
AS: Every night, I’d drive out to the launch pad and just be there, stand there, in solitude. It was very gratifying to look at the rocket with the little New Horizons spacecraft on top of the nose cone. I’d stay half an hour, or an hour. Nine-and-a-half years from now, I thought, we’ll be there. I thought, ‘Gosh, my son is twelve years old. When we get to Pluto, he’ll be 21. I can’t picture him at 21.’ I thought about how long the journey ahead was, and how it could end that week if it didn’t go well.
But the launch went without a single hiccup. It was spectacular to see how well it went. It was thrilling. It could not have gone better.
BR: Seven months after the launch, the IAU (International Astronomical Union) essentially demoted Pluto, declaring it was no longer a planet (reclassifying it as a “dwarf planet”). Had that happened earlier—when NASA was still debating the merits of a Pluto mission—would that have had an impact?
AS: Absolutely. It would have. I think we would have never seen the exploration of Pluto. I think it would’ve stopped us completely in our tracks.
DG: One of the unfortunate aspects about that so-called demotion—it promoted a misunderstanding that Pluto was some kind of an asteroid or uninteresting body. It doesn’t capture the essence of Pluto as this wonderfully complex, active, and dynamic world.
Credit: NASA / Bill Ingalls
Watching the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto on July 14 2015, at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
BR: Describe the flyby.
AS: The most incredible experience of my career. And I’ve been very fortunate to be on a lot of space missions. But I’ve never had anything like it—in terms of the gratification and the camaraderie, the spirit of scientific exploration and the public response—all at once, on about four hours of sleep a night.
BR: And then Pluto revealed itself.
AS: Pluto is the new Mars. It has turned out to be as complex and active a world as Mars, which no one expected. It’s just a scientific wonderland.
DG: There was a scale of one to ten on how interesting Pluto could be. One, it would be just a bunch of craters on an iceball. Ten, it would be like Triton, Neptune’s moon, which has varied terrains and some active features. And Pluto, on that scale, was a 17.
The mountain ranges look sort of like the Rocky Mountains, though they’re made of ice, not rock. There are some kinds of terrains we’ve never seen before on any planet in the solar system. The atmosphere is strange, with beautiful layers of haze. There is good circumstantial evidence for an underground ocean.
BR: Strictly speculation, but one wonders if there could be something living in that ocean.
DG: I think there is a possibility. We’re pretty sure there’s plenty of organic material on Pluto. The atmosphere is largely methane, and in sunlight, methane builds organic molecules. We see reddish stuff on the surface that we think is organic material. And there are certainly some energy sources in the interior.
That’s not enough to declare there’s life on Pluto. But I think Pluto has to be considered among the places in the solar system that are possible homes for life. It does kind of make you wonder, what might be crawling around down there.
">Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI
New Horizons revealed Pluto to be a marvelously complex world.
In July of 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by Pluto, a tiny world on the outskirts of our solar system. The encounter, though fleeting, made history.
But the behind-the-scenes struggle to get there, rife with power plays and political ploys, began a quarter-century earlier.
“Chasing New Horizons—Inside The Epic First Mission To Pluto” (Picador, 295 pages) chronicles the cancellations, false starts, stop-works, snafus, and ultimate success of a journey that many believed was doomed to fail.
In separate interviews, I spoke with co-authors Alan Stern, the principal investigator for New Horizons, and David Grinspoon, the astrobiologist and author. They described the enormous, sometimes excruciating task to get a three-billion-mile mission off the ground. Here are excerpts from our conversations.
BILL RETHERFORD: New Horizons sounds like the project that almost never happened.
ALAN STERN: It was a long and tortured trail. If the mission to Pluto were a cat, it would’ve been dead long ago, because a cat only has nine lives. If someone made a movie about it, nobody would believe it.
There was a long period, from about 1990 to 2003, when a year wouldn’t go by without the mission getting canceled or facing some threat. People would tell me to quit. But if we had done that, we wouldn’t be talking on the phone today, would we?
DAVID GRINSPOON: Alan lived this story and I followed it closely for decades. So many times I remember thinking, ‘God, these guys on this Pluto mission, it’s just crazy what they’re going through.’ It was unreal. It was like a monster movie where the monster keeps getting killed and keeps coming back to life.
I think a lot of people interested in space exploration tend to hear stories about the great missions, how they work technically, what we learned. But they don’t really hear the story of what it takes to get a mission from scratch to the launch pad and into space. And what it takes is a lot of maneuvering and responding and scheming to deal with the political threats.
That’s partly why we wanted to tell this story. To show people how the sausage is made. I’m a big fan of NASA. I don’t want to be critical of an organization that does some of the most magical, wonderful projects happening today. They do amazing stuff. But the reality of how it happens is just more complicated, like everything in life.
Credit: NASA
Four months before launch, the New Horizons spacecraft gets checked out.
BR: All along the way, some NASA scientists and administrators thought the mission wasn’t justified. What was their problem with Pluto?
AS: It would take nine-and-a-half years just to get to Pluto. If you are 55 in 1990, in mid-to-late career, and talking about a mission that was ultimately 25 years away—you might live to see it, but you might not benefit from it career-wise, because you would be retired. That’s a normal human tendency. It’s understandable. But it really was a barrier.
DG: People thought it was just so darn far away. Why should we put resources into this place when we don’t know if we can even get there? And there was a mindset that Pluto was just a curiosity, an oddball outlier—not something to help us piece together the story of the solar system. We might travel a decade to get there and then find out it’s some battered iceball that doesn’t tell us anything interesting.
BR: To offer just one example of all the fits and starts—in 2002, the Bush administration suddenly canceled the mission right after NASA approved it.
AS: That was surreal. Only two-and-a-half months after I got the phone call that we won, the Bush administration zeroed the money on the Pluto budget. The reason they gave was that it was overbudget. But I didn’t have a contract. You can’t be overbudget if you didn’t spend anything. We didn’t have a budget to be over.
DG: The contract hadn’t even been signed. Either it was a bureaucratic mistake or some machination by somebody in the OMB who really didn’t like the Pluto mission. Barbara Mikulski, the senator from Maryland, stepped in and got them to provide some emergency bridge funding while it got reconsidered.
It was crazy because the New Horizons team had to keep working. They didn’t have that long to design and build the spacecraft. The launch window could not be delayed. If they didn’t make the launch window, they couldn’t go to Pluto in their lifetimes. So they kept working while the funding was in doubt and the politics were worked out. It’s a strange way to start a spacecraft project. Just one of the weird episodes in this whole saga.
Credit: NASA
New Horizons takes off for Pluto from Cape Canaveral, January 19 2006.
BR: In turn, the scientists who favored a Pluto mission stuck together—and became insurgents, almost subversives.
DG: Yes, there was definitely a subversive quality to it. A small band of committed scientists going up against an older, more conservative establishment who didn’t understand the attraction of this far out dream.
That opposition cemented the bonds of those team members—the Plutophiles—who ultimately became the New Horizons team. The Plutophiles were in their twenties and thirties when they started out. Alan was a grad student, in his late twenties, when he first raised the idea of a Pluto mission.
BR: What was that like?
AS: At NASA, you can’t just walk in with a good idea and rise to the top. You have to get through a series of committees. There are ten times as many good ideas as there is money, so the process is steep and selective. We spent a lot of time making presentations, educating people who didn’t know anything about Pluto. They didn’t know how interesting it was.
But the project took so long, the personalities kept changing—the people in charge would change, and you would have to start all over. It became a bit of a maze, to get through all that.
DG: Alan and his compatriots were very strategic. They realized they needed to create a movement. They recruited people and drummed up interest so NASA would get a sense that people were clamoring for a mission. They got people to be as vocal as possible. Back then, it was all about writing letters. There was a letter-writing campaign in the professional community--and in the larger community of people excited about space exploration. The Planetary Society urged their members to write. And they did.
Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI
Pluto, with its moon, Charon. Although relative sizes are correct, separation is not to scale.
BR: It must have been something, in January 2006, to see New Horizons finally about to launch.
AS: Every night, I’d drive out to the launch pad and just be there, stand there, in solitude. It was very gratifying to look at the rocket with the little New Horizons spacecraft on top of the nose cone. I’d stay half an hour, or an hour. Nine-and-a-half years from now, I thought, we’ll be there. I thought, ‘Gosh, my son is twelve years old. When we get to Pluto, he’ll be 21. I can’t picture him at 21.’ I thought about how long the journey ahead was, and how it could end that week if it didn’t go well.
But the launch went without a single hiccup. It was spectacular to see how well it went. It was thrilling. It could not have gone better.
BR: Seven months after the launch, the IAU (International Astronomical Union) essentially demoted Pluto, declaring it was no longer a planet (reclassifying it as a “dwarf planet”). Had that happened earlier—when NASA was still debating the merits of a Pluto mission—would that have had an impact?
AS: Absolutely. It would have. I think we would have never seen the exploration of Pluto. I think it would’ve stopped us completely in our tracks.
DG: One of the unfortunate aspects about that so-called demotion—it promoted a misunderstanding that Pluto was some kind of an asteroid or uninteresting body. It doesn’t capture the essence of Pluto as this wonderfully complex, active, and dynamic world.
Credit: NASA / Bill Ingalls
Watching the spacecraft's closest approach to Pluto on July 14 2015, at the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
BR: Describe the flyby.
AS: The most incredible experience of my career. And I’ve been very fortunate to be on a lot of space missions. But I’ve never had anything like it—in terms of the gratification and the camaraderie, the spirit of scientific exploration and the public response—all at once, on about four hours of sleep a night.
BR: And then Pluto revealed itself.
AS: Pluto is the new Mars. It has turned out to be as complex and active a world as Mars, which no one expected. It’s just a scientific wonderland.
DG: There was a scale of one to ten on how interesting Pluto could be. One, it would be just a bunch of craters on an iceball. Ten, it would be like Triton, Neptune’s moon, which has varied terrains and some active features. And Pluto, on that scale, was a 17.
The mountain ranges look sort of like the Rocky Mountains, though they’re made of ice, not rock. There are some kinds of terrains we’ve never seen before on any planet in the solar system. The atmosphere is strange, with beautiful layers of haze. There is good circumstantial evidence for an underground ocean.
BR: Strictly speculation, but one wonders if there could be something living in that ocean.
DG: I think there is a possibility. We’re pretty sure there’s plenty of organic material on Pluto. The atmosphere is largely methane, and in sunlight, methane builds organic molecules. We see reddish stuff on the surface that we think is organic material. And there are certainly some energy sources in the interior.
That’s not enough to declare there’s life on Pluto. But I think Pluto has to be considered among the places in the solar system that are possible homes for life. It does kind of make you wonder, what might be crawling around down there.
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