Alan Stern Quotes
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As a researcher, I look forward to being able to do space science in a space environment.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Discovering that our solar system has many more planets than we ever expected, and that most of them are ice dwarfs rather than like Earth and the other rocky terrestrials, is just another step in the revolution in viewpoint that removed the Earth from the center of the physical universe and makes Earth all the more special.
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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.
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We made more than just scientific discoveries... we rediscovered how much people love exploration.
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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.
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I can't imagine how many kids around the world will look at pictures of Pluto and think, 'I want to grow up to be a scientist.'
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I call Pluto the harbinger.
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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.
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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.
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As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.
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People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.
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Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves.
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Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.
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My field is called planetary science.
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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.
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I expect New Horizons will see more that Hubble cannot see.
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Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.
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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.
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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.
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How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.
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I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.