Chasing New Horizons: Inside Humankind's First Mission to Pluto

by Alan Stern

To stay in touch, New Horizons depends, as do all long-distance spacecraft, on a largely unknown and unsung marvel of planetary exploration: NASA’s Deep Space Network. This trio of giant radio-dish complexes in Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia, seamlessly hands off communication duties between one another as the Earth rotates on its axis every twenty-four hours.

There is a phrase from World War I describing warfare as “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.” The same applies to long spacecraft missions.

a spacecraft is sent on a near-miss trajectory to one planet, which pulls it in and then speeds it toward its next target. It seems too good to be true—like getting something for nothing, but it’s not—the equations of orbital mechanics do not lie. For the planet, the tiny loss of orbital speed it trades with the spacecraft has no meaningful effect, but the spacecraft gets a whopping shove in just the right direction.

the motions of the planets line up to create such a conduit only once every 175 years.

Grand Tour

It just so happened that one such rare opportunity would soon present itself, and it was dubbed the “Grand Tour.” Using it, a spacecraft launched by the late 1970s could quickly travel all the way across the solar system, visiting every outer planet in turn and arriving at Pluto by the late 1980s.

There were lessons here for a young reader: The laws of physics can be our friends. They can be used to achieve things that would otherwise be beyond reach. And sometimes things line up just right to provide opportunities that, if not seized, won’t come around again for a very long time.

Nearly everyone involved in space exploration back then remembers where he or she was when the shuttle exploded, and some of us still get teary-eyed thinking of Christa McAuliffe, NASA’s first “teacher in space” and the others who lost their lives that cold morning in Florida.

So, even if the scientific community knows they really do want to go somewhere for the sheer joy and wonder of exploration, the challenge is to define a scientific rationale so compelling that it passes scientific muster.

And the surprises didn’t stop there. Compared to Pluto Charon was huge, with a mass almost 10 percent of Pluto’s: the pair literally formed a double planet (sometimes also called a binary)—a first in our solar system! A double planet was something completely unknown in planetary science before the discovery of Charon. Pluto, it seemed, became more exotic every time we learned something new about it.

He asked Briggs, “With Voyager winding down, why don’t we complete the job of exploring the solar system? Would you fund a study of how to do a mission to Pluto?” Alan was surprised by Briggs’s immediate, unhesitating, and positive response: “You know, no one’s ever asked me about that before. It’s a wonderful idea: we should do that.”

These missions were—in the lingo of the profession—“Christmas trees,” meaning they were loaded with so many capabilities and scientific instruments, which resulted in those multibillion-dollar price tags.

In the lingo of the trade, what they ultimately needed was an approved project, called a “new start.” Mission concepts are always being conceived, ranked, and studied. But what really counts is when NASA commits to a mission by putting it in its budget and proposing it to Congress. Only then—when the funding to design and build it is allocated—does a project achieve a new start.

As it turned out, JPL, following a dictum from NASA Headquarters, had put expensive Europa-mission Jupiter radiation-protection design requirements on PKE, like a boat anchor, and that anchor had sunk Pluto by driving its cost skyward.

Wao. The problems of large organizations

And what did Weiler’s folks do when the kid arrived there? They put the seventeen-year-old in a room with six adults, six NASA bureaucrats, and they began questioning him: “Who put you up to this? Why are you coming here out of nowhere? Who’s backing you? Who paid for your trip?” And the kid responded saying something like, “It’s just me. I want to see Pluto explored, and you have dashed my dream. How could you?” Nichols himself and that dream of his became a media story that personalized the cancellation, embodying the disappointment of youth.

NEAR had been a triumph by every measure. How did APL manage to perform so well? One big part of it was a management philosophy of not having more managers than was absolutely necessary, since layers and layers of managers drove costs up. Instead, they put more responsibility at the level where the knowledge was—with their engineers. APL also kept their missions small through a fundamental desire to remain a lean organization. APL preferred to grow in prominence rather than head count.

We essentially came up with what later became the New Horizons concept, including the shape of the spacecraft, paring it down to one plutonium battery—a leftover from Cassini—and other innovations to cut cost and to create a believable schedule to launch in time for a Jupiter gravity assist. Our study showed it, and I assured NASA that it could all be done for much less than $500 million, including reserves.

But the next morning, only a week before proposals were due, came the terrible shock and tragedy of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Everyone who is old enough to remember that day will recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news about terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

Wao a whole generation born after this is coming to age.

Previously, due to all the bruising approval and funding battles to get New Horizons started, I had felt the attitude at NASA Headquarters was more or less “You shoved this mission down our throats—good luck pal; we hope you make it.” Simply put, there had always been either some passive-aggressive behavior going on, or maybe just benign neglect, but either way, that kept us from being able to solve many of our toughest management challenges.

By far the best tool for searching for small moons around Pluto was the Hubble Space Telescope, but it’s never been easy to get observing time on the Hubble. The selection committees that allocate Hubble observing time typically receive seven to ten times as many proposals to use the telescope as there is available time.

No doubt, there was something that drew people to this particular launch—a sense of something epochal, a passing of the torch from Voyager to a new generation of explorers who had been inspired by Voyager. You could feel it; it was in the air, now it was a new generation’s chance to explore never-before-seen worlds.

So Alan asked his spacecraft engineers how one would actually do this, how they could mount a small container on the bird, because in spaceflight even something sentimental needed to be engineered. The engineers designed a small container that they would affix to a spacecraft wall and use to replace a small balance weight.

For those not directly involved in the launch—the bystanders, press, and team members there with families to witness their baby leave the planet—there was a Groundhog Day aspect to the repeated launch attempts. The various mission contractors threw hotel parties the night before each launch count, catering the exact same foods and drinks each time. Although the launch and mission teams were hard at work, there was a whole other life of parties going on for all the visitors.

Many planetary scientists had long been referring to the rich harvest of newly discovered small planets in the Kuiper Belt as “dwarf planets,” a term Alan coined in a 1991 research paper mathematically calculating that the solar system might contain as many as one thousand of them. He chose the term “dwarf planet” in analogy to the well accepted astronomical term “dwarf stars,” like the Sun, that are the most common type of stars in the universe.

Queen guitarist Brian May (who is also a card-carrying Ph.D. astrophysicist),

Yes

The solution to this challenge was called the “fail-safe” data transmission. When he conceived it, Alan likened it to astronaut Neil Armstrong’s “contingency sample” collection, the first thing Armstrong did after stepping onto the Moon in 1969. Then the logic was to have something to show scientifically for the mission of Apollo 11 in case something went immediately wrong, and he and Buzz Aldrin had to suddenly abandon their moonwalk before more comprehensive lunar sampling could take place.

There is a long tradition in space missions to mark milestone occasions with a “wake-up song.” That started all the way back in 1965 when the astronauts of Gemini 6 were woken up in flight with “Hello, Dolly!” and it continued across all the human spaceflights ever since. Somewhere in the 1990s, robotic missions began using music for milestone occasions, too.

For the occasion of New Horizons emerging from its last hibernation en route to Pluto, Alan chose a piece called “Faith of the Heart,” an emotional theme song from the TV series Star Trek: Enterprise. Its lyrics seemed so appropriate to the journey of New Horizons. In fact, when Alan heard this song, to him it seemed to be telling the whole story of the mission.

with Amy Teitel, a historian and journalist, and one of the “media embeds” he had hired to help translate flyby science into NASA press releases.

And youtuber!!!

Amy caught me off guard a little. She said something like “In a few days, the biggest thing in your career is going to happen, and then it’s going to be over. Nothing you do later will possibly equal it. Can you cope with that?” And then she said, “A lot of people might face a nervous breakdown once something like that is behind them. How will you handle it?”

So, I was a little incredulous that everyone wanted to do this, even Glen, and that no one was thinking that, well, “better” might be the enemy of “good enough.”

Alan had been referring to Pluto as the “Everest of the Solar System” since the 1990s—meaning that it was the last, the farthest, the coldest, and the hardest peak of planetary exploration.

Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May with team members at the Pluto encounter.

He is an astrophycisits