Mission to Pluto makes thrilling story
The story of the first exploration of Pluto is told between two postage stamps.
In 1991, the United States Postal Service created a set of stamps with photographs of the planets with a notable omission. Pluto was designated as “Not yet explored,” and represented by a painting. In May 2016, the USPS issued a new stamp set — Pluto Explored! — with a photo of the remote planet and the New Horizons, the interplanetary space probe that buzzed past Pluto at 32,000 miles per hour.
Between those two stamps is a story involving years of research, thousands of people working in coordination and billions of miles, along with rejection, false starts, a fraught communications blackout, interplanetary research grudges and all manner of drama.
Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, with astrobiologist and writer David Grinspoon, told that story in “Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto.” Theirs is a space and science book that reads more like a thriller.
“It’s a book about space exploration but we’d like it to be a breakout book about space exploration,” Stern says. “It is a thriller and an adventure story because it tells what actually happened.”
Adds Grinspoon, “We
certainly left a lot out because we wanted an accessible book. Somebody else can write the scholarly book, 700 pages long with the footnotes. We wanted to tell this as the adventure story that it is.”
Befitting a mission that took years to get to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, and then additional years as New Horizons made its way across more than 3 billion miles, “Chasing New Horizons” has a few different starting points.
One starting point is the story of Clyde Tombaugh, described as “a Kansas farm boy with no formal technical training,” who looked at the night skies through a Sears Roebuck telescope. He’d go on to pick up the work of storied astronomer Percival Lowell, seeking an elusive Planet X, which Tombaugh found in 1930.
“Tombaugh was a giant,” Stern says. “He was doing work in the ’30s that technology didn’t catch up to until the ’90s. He had legendary skills, and he pulled off something amazing. He’s a great American.”
Stern came along nearly 20 years later, born in New Orleans in 1957. The story of “Chasing New Horizons” also could be said to begin with his time at the University of Texas, where in 1980 he asked a planetary research professor for some guidance for a worthwhile research problem.
“Why don’t you work on Pluto?” was the response.
Stern has been involved in 29 scientific space missions in his career. Pluto could have been his white whale, only Stern wasn’t drowned by his quarry. So instead it became a legacy project.
In conversation, Stern repeatedly deflects attention to the team of about 2,500 people whose work on New Horizons extended beyond a decade, from conception to planning to execution to analysis.
“It was a grueling process,” he says. “But the whole project team worked their tails off against very long odds to make it happen. Some things came out of the blue and a few fell in our favor. Some didn’t. But hard work by a talented team is why it paid off. People say you make your own luck.”
To reveal too much about the logistical web involved in the New Horizons project would rob the reader of the story Stern and Grinspoon tell. But the pacing of their story is bracing as the idea of a Pluto mission was met with skepticism and setbacks, one after the other, including a pronouncement at one point that the mission was “Dead, dead, dead.” That’s very dead. “That’s an exact quote,” Grinspoon says. “One or two deads might have been ambiguous, I guess.”
But New Horizons wasn’t dead.
The authors have with the book achieved a certain narrative sleight of hand. Learning more about the solar system inevitably shrinks it, in a sense, as unknowns become knowns. But to a layperson who just gazed at the photos of Pluto splashed on papers and websites in 2015, the story in “Chasing New Horizons” is one of unthinkable scope, where the launchpad moment comes nearly a decade before the mission’s success or failure can be known. During which transmissions between Earth and the vessel — which were moving at the speed of light — could still take 10 hours. The mission also couldn’t have launched at any given time. A cliche on Earth, the planets literally had to align for New Horizons to be successful. A nine-year journey ultimately passed through a nineminute window.
“Part of the story is about delayed gratification,” Grinspoon says. “This whole decade in the wilderness. And part of that story for the participants was tedious. But we didn’t want it to be tedious for the reader. So we tried to convey what some of the experience was like for the team. How a proposal was canceled, with emotional reactions.”
The project itself provided some drama. After rejection at the outset, the project’s green light came in a way that forced a red-eyed blitz of planning. And days before the spacecraft was to pass Pluto, a communications blackout created whiteknuckled tension back on Earth. The authors also offer some historical context to present the stakes involved. In 1992 the Mars Observer blew up, illustrating how these huge financial undertakings come with no promise of reward.
And mid-mission, a dispute arose about Pluto’s designation as a planet. While that designation was mined for laughs on late-night TV and used as a punch line in a Randy Newman song, Stern actually found it void of humor. “Chasing New
Horizons” attributes it to a petty attempt by a British astronomer to undo Tombaugh’s legacy.
“I don’t find it funny at all, frankly,” Stern says. “To try to erase the legacy of this great man is not only tragic, from a historic standpoint, it felt to me to be borderline criminal. As a professional planetary scientist, I found their work to be tragically flawed, scientifically. There was funding and science at stake, and it felt like one profession meddling in another.”
So perhaps readers will find little touches of lightness elsewhere. Maybe in sentences like, “For the Plutophiles, the late 1990s was a low point in morale.”
But even that moment illustrates how “Chasing New Horizons” bridges worlds between Plutophiles and those who might once have been classified as Pluto-neutral.
“It’s true, we’re social creatures,” Grinspoon says. “We tend to find like-minded people and bond together. And Plutophiles faced some adversity that made them bond together strongly. It becomes more than common interest. But that’s why we worked hard on this story’s plotline. We wanted to arrange it to be an adventure story as well as an interesting book about science. We didn’t want it to be weighted down by equations.”
An early comment in the book by Stern underscores the book’s broad appeal.
“I’m really inspired by exploration itself,” he writes, “independent of the science.”