Quotes by Alan Stern

“Itll be the fastest spacecraft ever to Jupiter…13 months after launch. We pass the Moon in just nine hours.”

“It used to be that Pluto was a misfit. Now it turns out that Earth is the misfit. Most planets in the solar system look like Pluto, and not like the terrestrial planets.”

“It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most populous class of planet in our solar system and we have never sent a mission to this class.”

“Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the average. The Pluto-like objects are more typical in our solar system than the nearby planets we first knew.”

“This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part of the solar system are such mysteries that New Horizons will rewrite all of the textbooks.”

“This is the capstone of the missions to the planets that NASA has led since the 1960s.”

“I ... was not comfortable with launching without backup power. Ive been working on this for 17 years ... Two or three days doesnt mean a hill of beans.”

“Well be like kids in a candy shop.”

“Two or three days doesnt mean a hill of beans.”

“The air conditioning was off. The flight controllers were sitting there wiping sweat. If they were dealing with any spacecraft issues, which first day out of the box a lot of spacecraft have, you cant concentrate like that.”

Were in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We havent explored it very well.

Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.

There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Plutos the only one thats got all the cool attributes.

I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, its about destinations.

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that weve invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.

Im hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think thats only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are large profits to be made.

I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. Theyre wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether theyre light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. Were seeing intriguing things, but we really dont know whats in there.

The big lesson of planetary science is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of object, you should expect the unexpected.

A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what theyre next to.

Of course Pluto is a planet: Its massive enough to have its shape controlled by gravity rather than material strength, which is the hallmark of planethood.