Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto by Alan Stern & David Grinspoon

Author:Alan Stern & David Grinspoon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Aeronautics & Astronautics, Astronomy, Engineering & Transportation, Science & Math
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2018-05-02T03:00:00+00:00

SAY A LITTLE PRAYER

As launch week approached, people started to gather around the Cape by the hundreds, and then by the thousands. In addition to the engineers, managers, launch staff, scientists, and others directly involved with the mission, there was a growing army of journalists, documentarians, students, and teachers, as well as thousands of space fans and curious onlookers coming to view what promised to be a history-making launch. There wasn’t a hotel vacancy to be found within an hour’s drive of the Kennedy Space Center.

Among those in attendance were many of the original members of the Pluto Underground, who had been working since 1989 to get a mission to Pluto. Also there were other members of the planetary science community, people from the engineering teams, executives from every major partner in the project, and Mike Griffin. Nothing like this—the launch of a first reconnaissance mission to a new planet—had occurred since 1977, when the twin Voyagers launched to explore the giant planets.

A few days before launch, members of the New Horizons science team gathered for a final, daylong prelaunch meeting. Alan spoke to this group, reminding them of just how far they had come, and how after all those battles over all those nearly seventeen years, they had succeeded. Now they were gathered together on the eve of launch, with their extraordinary spacecraft mounted atop a rocket the size of a city skyscraper, ready to leave Earth, forever.

They had come very far indeed, but after Alan spoke, it struck him that everything they hoped to learn, everything they had worked for, depended on a successful launch, and then the almost ten-year, three-billion-mile journey ahead. Everything, really, was still ahead of them.

The next night, Alan went out to the launch pad with Todd May and Rex Geveden. Almost no one else was there. But there was New Horizons, atop its twenty-two-story-tall behemoth launcher called Atlas. The image of that rocket burned itself into Alan’s memory. He knew it would only be there briefly, for a few more days, and then it would fly. It would be gone, and whether it succeeded or failed, he would never see it again.

The sea breeze washed over him; he could smell the salty, coastal Cape Canaveral air, a familiar memory from other launches he’d been involved in. He looked up at the rocket and quietly spoke to it: “Make us proud.” Then he turned and walked back to his car.

The next morning they would count down to launch to Pluto.

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