Alan Stern Quotes
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CASIS has to succeed because for it not to succeed would be a huge setback for the International Space Station program.
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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.
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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.
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We really just didn't realize the diversity of planetary types in our solar system. Pluto looked like a misfit because it was the only one we saw. And just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. They're large enough to make themselves round by self gravity, and they surely pass the test of planethood.
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Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.
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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.
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A miniature poodle is not not a dog just because it's miniature.
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Pluto has strong atmospheric cycles: it snows on the surface; the snows sublimate and go back into the atmosphere each 248 year orbit.
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Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.
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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.
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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.
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Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.
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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.
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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.
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People dig exploration.
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Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust.
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The Pluto system is much more complex than I had expected.
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Liquids may have existed on the surface of Pluto in the past.
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If you put Earth out beyond Neptune, you wouldn't be able to call it a planet because it couldn't clear its zone.
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Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.
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Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?
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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.
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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.
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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.