Alan Stern

“Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?”

“We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.”

“When we first sent missions to Jupiter, no one expected to find moons that would have active volcanoes. And I could go down a long list of how often I've been surprised by the richness of nature.”

“By going to Pluto, we have a chance to anchor, with real data, models of the early evolution of Earth's atmosphere.”

“The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.”

“Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but its atmosphere is bigger than the Earth's.”

“Back before the Kuiper Belt was discovered, Pluto did look like a misfit that didn't belong with either the terrestrials or the giant planets.”

“The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth's moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.”

“Just because Pluto orbits with many other dwarf planets doesn't change what it is, just as whether an object is a mountain or not doesn't depend on whether it's in a group or in isolation.”

“Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.”

“I call Pluto the harbinger.”

“One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.”

“Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves.”

“The basic story for Golden Spike is that we discovered a way to create do-it-yourself Apollo programs for other countries.”

“Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.”

“CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.”

“At the time of Apollo 11, I was a grade-schooler, and I remember every time an Apollo mission would take place that, like a lot of little boys, I'd gather in front of the TV for hours and hours and hours with my little brother.”

“I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.”

“During one of the Apollo missions, I saw Walter Cronkite showing off the flight plan. It just mesmerized me. All this detail! That's what I wanted.”

“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 clearer.”