164 Quotes by Alan Stern

When word of the astronomers’ vote in Prague reached the New Horizons team, reactions ranged from indifferent (“Who cares what astronomers think? They’re not the experts in this.”), to bemused, to annoyed, to seriously pissed off. As Fran Bagenal succinctly put it, “Dwarf people are people. Dwarf planets are planets. End of argument.

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.

They had done it! Against all the struggles, doubts, and naysayers of the past 17 years, a spaceship had left Earth that day on its way to explore the Pluto system. With it rode the hopes of its team and a larger scientific community for what discoveries it would make there, a decade hence, in the cold, cold reaches of the outer solar system.

The people who created this amazing mission of exploration chased their new horizons hard; they never let go of their dream; they put everything they had into it; and eventually they chased it down and accomplished what they set out to do.

Whether or not an object has a moon is not part of the criteria that we've considered, because so many small objects in the solar system have moons,

We're realizing just how much there is to the deep, outer solar system. I think it's exciting that textbooks have to be rewritten, over and over.

It'll be the fastest spacecraft ever to Jupiter...13 months after launch. We pass the Moon in just nine hours.

It's strictly coincidental that Pluto of course was named for the god of the underworld and we're describing these Halloween moons

Naming celestial objects is usually done by astronomers and professionals. Other people who are interested in space never get the opportunity to do that kind of thing.