Alan Stern

Competition-driven innovation and price pressure that commercial practices foster can only make human spaceflight ever more common and U.S. leadership in this…

— Alan Stern

Of course Pluto is a planet: It's massive enough to have its shape controlled by gravity rather than material strength, which is…

— Alan Stern

It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most…

— Alan Stern

The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant…

— Alan Stern

I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be…

— Alan Stern

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

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

— Alan Stern

When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go…

— Alan Stern

Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would…

— Alan Stern

The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the…

— Alan Stern

If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans…

— Alan Stern

To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders…

— Alan Stern

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

One of the implications of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and its many small planets is that many scientists now think…

— Alan Stern

CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.

— Alan Stern

America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting…

— Alan Stern

The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to…

— Alan Stern

Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.

— Alan Stern

If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every…

— Alan Stern

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

— Alan Stern

No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons,…

— Alan Stern

Discovering that our solar system has many more planets than we ever expected, and that most of them are ice dwarfs rather…

— Alan Stern

I can't imagine how many kids around the world will look at pictures of Pluto and think, 'I want to grow up…

— Alan Stern

Just speaking for myself, I think the return of people to the Moon has a lot to offer for understanding the formation…

— Alan Stern

My field is called planetary science.

— Alan Stern