All we needed to do now is build a spacecraft, test it, launch it, and fly it 3 billion miles to Pluto. So we did. It worked out. We built a small spacecraft, about the size of a baby grand piano, and we launched it on the largest rocket we could get, an Atlas V. It’s about twenty stories tall. So you’ve got a small spacecraft, a big rocket, and what you get is the fastest spacecraft ever launched—it’s going at thirty-four thousand miles per hour. To put that in perspective, when the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, it took over three days. For New Horizons the spacecraft passed the moon in
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