Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

I'm typically wary of books about specific missions like this because they have a tendency to be dry and technical. That's not the case with this book. The firsthand accounts from Alan Stern about the many difficulties in getting a Pluto mission approved and launched (they started pushing for a Pluto mission in the late 80's, fought all through the 90's, and not until the early 2000's did they finally get their shot and even then many things were working against them) are surprisingly gripping. I wouldn't have thought that reading about over a decade of administrative and political battles for getting a probe to Pluto would be too interesting, but the clear writing made it easy to follow and even had me thinking a few times "I can't believe this all ended up working out in the end, because there were so many near disasters along the way!" The interesting parts don't end after the probe finally launches, either. While I was sitting around back from 2006-2015 occasionally thinking about New Horizons coasting to Pluto and wondering if the team was getting bored during the downtime, it turns out that the team still had a ton of work to do in planning the nitty-gritty details of the flyby. And even then, they kept getting thrown curve balls! The fun of this book is really in seeing just how stacked against the New Horizons team the odds were, and how they succeeded in spite of it all. What do you do when you have a probe racing towards a planet, you've spent years programming and testing an elaborate observation plan for what the probe is going to do when it gets there, and then suddenly you discover two new moons orbiting your target planet? Are you going to hit those moons? How are you going to re-write the observation plan to get data on them? These are the things Chasing New Horizons covers, and even knowing that it all works out in the end, the authors' candid storytelling of how dicey things got at times really makes this a good read that holds your attention all the way through. This is no dry and technical spaceflight book. This is an adventure across the solar system that ran up against countless potential catastrophes and through human ingenuity managed to overcome the odds and bring us our first detailed view of Pluto and its moons.

Intriguing read! Highly recommend

First and foremost, you should read both books – "Discovering Pluto" by Sheehan and Cruikshank, and "Chasing New Horizons" by Stern and Grinspoon. They are both excellent and authoritative, but very different in coverage and style. Discovering Pluto (DP) is a well-researched history (400 dense pages), replete with footnotes and sources, exploring the 19th century calculations to find a Planet X, and how Tombaugh's careful search found Pluto. Full of fascinating anecdotes and asides, it then relates the early days of infrared astronomy and the discovery of ices on Pluto and its satellite Charon, an enterprise in which Cruikshank played a central part. The story moves on to the measurement of Pluto's atmosphere, and the discovery of other Kuiper belt objects, before the final 100 pages relate the New Horizons mission and its findings. Chasing New Horizons (CNH) is a faster-paced account of the origin and execution of the mission, as told by its main protagonist, Alan Stern. The book provides a fascinating insight into the long years of political maneuvering to get a Pluto mission into NASA's queue, as well as the technical challenges of building and flying a spacecraft for a few days of intense observations after almost a decade in space. While it is an engaging tale for sure, readers may become wearied by just how often they are told how many all-nighters and weekends the team worked. On the other hand, I was disappointed not to read more about Stern's unsuccessful attempt to pitch a 'New Horizons 2' to Uranus and the Kuiper belt, his tenure as a NASA Associate Administrator, the team's posture on feature-naming, and the implementation of a dress code at the Pluto Encounter. The difference in style of the two books is acutely exposed in their treatments of the IAU definition of planet; CNH is predictably acerbic (but illuminating), while DP chooses not to dwell on the matter. Both make the interesting point that the definition was made largely by astronomers and dynamicists, rather than actual planetary scientists; both also note the tautology that under the new classification 'a dwarf planet is not a planet'; both fail to note, however, that the controversy may have garnered far more public attention to Pluto than this remote iceball might otherwise have received prior to the New Horizons encounter! Pluto turned out to be far more interesting than I had expected, and both books do a good job of summarizing the key findings from New Horizons. On balance, I liked DP a little better, but both books make great reading, and I learned a lot from each. Ralph Lorenz – Author, Cassini-Huygens Owners Workshop Manual

Incredible story about the work and preparation that went into the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kieper Belt. The political machinations and sheer brainpower that is required for an enterprise such as New Horizons.

If you're a space buff and were fascinated by the New Horizon mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt - this is the book for you. It provides a ringside view of the campaign, trials and tribulations in getting a spaceship to explore Pluto - the kind of backroom stuff one never thinks about (How does NASA decide on what to explore, after all?). I really liked the description of all the trade-offs and innovation that went into the spaceship design and the plan for the flyby and beyond. Despite having followed the events of the flyby, there were many questions that I didn't get an answer to at the time - why didn't New Horizons orbit Pluto, why did it take so long to send the images back, what did each image tell us...and so on. This book does not tell you everything, but it does tell you enough to satisfy your immediate curiosity and whet your appetite for more. The writing is fast paced - at times a little too rah-rah for me - but one is unlikely to get bored. I would probably have preferred a little more detail towards the end, but maybe that's for another book!

Entertaining mix of coorporate politics, science and engineering. Highly recommend!

Chasing New Horizons est le récit, de l'intérieur, de la grande aventure spatiale vers Pluton. Alan Stern en est le héros principal, et sa ténacité dans un but nourri dès l'enfance s'illustre à chaque page. Depuis les missions Apollo, le public n'avait jamais autant vibré. L'arrivée en juillet 2015 des photos à haute résolution de la planète déchue sonna le succès de la mission. Et elle n'a pas fini de nous étonner, puisque la sonde est destinée à rencontrer d'autres astres sur son passage comme certains corps de la ceinture de Kuiper. Un livre palpitant à tous égards.

I love this book. I am very interested in the exploration of Pluto and this book gave me all I needed, wanted and more.