During one of the Apollo missions, I saw Walter Cronkite showing off the flight plan. It just mesmerized me. All this detail!… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions. — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led -… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
It's very hard to motivate yourself and others with only one goal - particularly if it's complex and you might not get… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
New Horizons is a very high-tech, small, roughly 1,000-pound spacecraft with the most powerful battery of scientific instrumentation ever brought to bear… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
If the Pluto mission was a cat, then it would've been dead long ago because they only get nine lives, and we've… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part… — Alan Stern Copy Share Image
Competition-driven innovation and price pressure that commercial practices foster can only make human spaceflight ever more common and U.S. leadership in this domain ever… — Alan Stern Copy Share
Of course Pluto is a planet: It's massive enough to have its shape controlled by gravity rather than material strength, which is the hallmark… — Alan Stern Copy Share
It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most populous class… — Alan Stern Copy Share
The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is… — Alan Stern Copy Share
I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like… — Alan Stern Copy Share
If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone. — Alan Stern Copy Share
When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a… — Alan Stern Copy Share
Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off… — Alan Stern Copy Share
The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out… — Alan Stern Copy Share
If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on… — Alan Stern Copy Share
To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and… — Alan Stern Copy Share
We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt. — Alan Stern Copy Share
One of the implications of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and its many small planets is that many scientists now think of the… — Alan Stern Copy Share
CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program. — Alan Stern Copy Share
