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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.
There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.
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.
The Kuiper Belt is the largest mapped structure in our planetary system, three times as big as all the territory from the sun out to Neptune's orbit.
I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like that again. We'll just have to see.
Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.
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 of planethood.
It is only by freeing NASA from routine human transport to low-Earth orbit that we can afford to once again see American astronauts exploring distant worlds.
The Kuiper belt region, which I call the third zone because it lies beyond the rocky terrestrial planets and beyond the giant planets, is a bizarre frontier.
When I started working with NASA in 1989 as part of a mission to send spacecraft to Pluto, I knew it would take at least 10-15 years to see results of my efforts.
A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.
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.
To keep everyone invested in your vision, you have to back up a little bit and really analyze who the different stakeholders are and what they individually respond to.
One of the implications of the discovery of the Kuiper Belt and its many small planets is that many scientists now think of the solar system as having not two but three zones.
You could not have predicted the amazing discoveries at Pluto, even though we have been to a couple of objects in the solar system that were at least a little analogous to Pluto.
The costs of badly-run NASA projects are paid for with cutbacks or delays in NASA projects that didn't go over budget. Hence the guilty are rewarded and the innocent are punished.
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.
If the Pluto mission was a cat, then it would've been dead long ago because they only get nine lives, and we've had significantly more than nine stoppages and odd twists and turns.
Science doesn't work by voting. Did people vote on the theory of relativity? No! It's either right or it's wrong. Do we vote on whether genetics is a good theory or not? Of course not.
If two billion people wanted to watch a robot fly by Pluto, imagine what it will be like when the first humans step on Mars. It'll be the most unifying event anybody could ever put on.
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.
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 on a first reconnaissance mission.
It used to be said that Pluto is a misfit. But now we know Earth is the misfit. This is the most populous class of planet in our solar system and we have never sent a mission to this class.
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.
The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.
Just because Pluto or comets aren't as big as Jupiter doesn't mean they are not scientifically important - indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.
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.
It's very hard to motivate yourself and others with only one goal - particularly if it's complex and you might not get there until years down the road. That's why intermediate goals are so important.
I think that one of the things that will come out of the New Horizons mission is that the public will take a look, and they won't know what else to call Pluto but a planet - and a pretty exciting one.
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.
This is in a real sense the capstone of the initial missions to explore the planets. Pluto, its moons and this part of the solar system are such mysteries that New Horizons will rewrite all of the textbooks.
Just speaking for myself, I think the return of people to the Moon has a lot to offer for understanding the formation and evolution of terrestrial worlds; so would the exploration of near-Earth asteroids by people.
There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.
I like the planets because they are real places that you can go to and send machines to. Faraway astronomy - galactic astronomy and extra-galactic astronomy - is really cool stuff, but to me, it's about destinations.
America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting legacy of this nation's greatness. It has studied Earth in ways no other nation can match.
People ask, 'What are the scientific questions you're going to answer?' New Horizons doesn't have any of those; it's purely about raw exploration... We're not 'rewriting the textbook' - we're writing the textbook from scratch.
New Horizons isn't just visiting Pluto; it's visiting this entire region. Whatever it finds, this will be a signal moment for planetary exploration - the capstone to our first reconnaissance of the planets of our solar system.
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.
It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.
As a scientist in charge of space sensors and entire space missions before I was at NASA, I myself was involved in projects that overran. But that's no excuse for remaining silent about this growing problem or failing to champion reform.
Typically in science, individual scientists make up their minds about scientific fact or theory one at a time. We don't take votes. We just don't vote on quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, why the sky is blue, or anything else.
No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things.
In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies... many members of the public assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.
I'm hopeful that commercial space exploration will takeoff. To really fuel the spaceflight revolution will require an investment of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and I think that's only going to happen in the commercial sector - if there are large profits to be made.
We're just learning that a lot of planets are small planets, and we didn't know that before, fact is, in planetary science, objects such as Pluto and the other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt are considered planets and called planets in everyday discourse in scientific meetings.
Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.
No one working as an astronomer is shackled in chains. This is a tremendous profession. There are lots of neat people, and you get to do cool things. If I had to say something negative, it's that there's often a whole lot of travel that takes me away from my children. That can be a bummer a lot of times.
It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.
I tend to think of Pluto and its moons as presents sitting under a Christmas tree. They're wrapped, and from Earth all we can do is look at the boxes to see whether they're light or heavy, to see if something maybe jiggles a bit inside. We're seeing intriguing things, but we really don't know what's in there.
In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.