Browsable

This book is one third NASA bureaucracy, fundraising and politics, one third memoir-ish self promotion, and one third actual mission and Pluto science. Most of the multi-decade insider fighting and politicking is set out at the beginning of the book, so don't despair and just keep browsing. At the midpoint you'll have to pick and choose for interesting tidbits. The last third is the meat of the book, although a lot of the science, (including a "Top Ten" science findings addendum), seems to have been tacked on as an afterthought.

So, interesting, but a bit of a chore to ferret out the good stuff. (Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

Every once in a while, I wonder where I would have ended up had I stayed at Ohio State instead of joining the Air Force in the mid-80s. My major was astronomy, with a minor in physics, topics which still fascinate me to this day. Maybe I would have ended up on one of these exploration projects... who knows?

Anyway, this is a great book on the trials and tribulations of the Plutophiles, scientists and engineers that pushed NASA leadership for decades to have Pluto explored, as well as the Kuiper Belt on the extreme outer edge of our solar system. The New Horizons is still transmitting, and after reaching Pluto after nine years of flight in 2015, is now approaching the strange planetoids of Kuiper. Amazing!

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect of Chasing New Horizons. Sure, a trip to Pluto is exciting and intriguing, and the results that have already come back are thrilling. But I wasn’t sure that a book about devising the actual mission would be—the planning, the meetings, the engineering, the pushing of buttons and waiting while radio signals traveled for hours after which one could push more buttons. But Alan Stern, leader of the NASA mission, and David Grinspoon, and astrobiologist who had some minor involvement, managed to pull it off. I don’t know if I’d call it “thrilling,” but inspiring? Fascinating? Exciting? Tense? All that and more.

The story opens with a phone to Stern telling him NASA had lost contact with the spaceship, this after nine year of flight and only a week before the flyby was due to happen. On his way over, Stern “couldn’t help but think of NASA’s ill-fated Mars Observer . . . [that also went silent, just three days reaching Mars . . .It had blown up.” But his would be worse. Mars has had a host of visitors from Earth; this was Pluto’s first and most likely only for decades if not longer. New Horizons, Stern feared, would “become a poster child for dashed dreams and failure.”

It’s no spoiler to say that New Horizons did not blow up, did not become a symbol of utter failure and busted dreams. And I of course knew that even as I was reading this. But somehow, cutting away to the main part of the story (as one long flashback) before we find out whether (really “how”) NASA regained contact still felt tense. It shouldn’t have worked as a tension builder, but it did. And that’s pretty much true of all of Chasing New Horizons. It all just works.

The book moves along at a fast but comprehensible clip. Early in the story the necessary context and background — prior space missions, the discovery of Pluto and its naming, finding out Pluto had a moon — are effectively and concisely covered. The sheer chutzpah of thinking we could send a spacecraft billions of miles away is nicely conveyed, as is the passion of those early believers who had to push NASA to even consider such a seemingly outlandish proposal.

Or, it turns out, proposals, since the book details the fierce competition between multiple teams trying to reach Pluto. A literal competition since NASA took plans and then would choose only one. You’d think the science, or maybe the cost would be the deciding factors, but some of the more fascinating tidbits are the ways politics, personalities, professional rivalries, and the like played major roles in the back and forths and ups and downs before Stern’s proposal/team (an underdog group to the much more established Jet Propulsion Laboratory) was finally chosen. The authors don’t shy away from some of the more petty activity, or even out and out charges of attempted sabotage (not of equipment but of mission control). Senator Barbara Mikulski is one of the heroes of the story (later Stern notes she should have a Pluto feature named after her), while new NASA head Dan Goldin comes across as painfully naïve when he says he wants a Pluto mission to bring back a sample in under ten years and for less than a 100 million.

There are more than a few tense moments in the pre-mission stretch, including the whole idea being canceled more than once. The anxiety gets ramped up by a ticking clock, caused by how far away Pluto is—the launch window for a successful mission was pretty tight; fail on this one, or get it overly delayed, and NASA would have to wait decades for the next propitious time. While all this is going on there’s a fun but sharply delivered digression into the whole controversy over whether or not Pluto was even a planet any more, based on the new discoveries of large bodies out in the Kuiper Belt. Frustrating as that was for the team, it did actually help them as tacking on a promise to explore one such body gave added weight to their proposal.

Wisely, we don’t delve into too much engineering detail, though we get enough to know what instruments were aboard and what they did, as well as how advanced they were, the difficulties of building machines that work in the harshness of outer space, and the incredible diligence that has to go into testing them. After all, one can’t just pop out and fix something that breaks when the machine is a few billion miles away.

Every time the story seems to be in cruise control, there’s another little twist or turn to rev up the interest level. The aforementioned argument over Pluto’s status. The discovery of more moons beyond Charon. The worry over a debris field in the area that could cause catastrophic failure. Tough decisions that had to be made regarding mission priorities. And then of course that loss of contact.

The problem was of course eventually solved (with people working days without sleep, or the luckier ones sleeping on air mattresses in hallways), and then the book moves into sheer wonder mode as New Horizons begins to send back high-res photos. Here is Stern on that moment:

This wasn’t another fuzzy image made from too great a distance . . . this one was razor sharp, and for the first time revealed Pluto’s amazing geological beauty. With that image, Pluto became a place, just like Mars or Titan or even Earth, and it revealed itself to be a place beyond my wildest imagination. You could see mountain ranges, craters, canyons, giant ice fields, and more! Pluto was gorgeous . . I couldn’t take my eyes of it.

High fives, cheers, shivers, and tears make the rounds, and I confess I choked up myself at a few points (yes, I’m that guy). Pause and think for a moment of the achievement. Twenty-six years in the planning and building, almost three thousand people involved, culminating (for the moment) in pictures of a place three billion miles from Earth. Adding even more poignancy is that New Horizons carried with it some of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes.

Post-contact the book reveals some of the science already pulled from the data, which has really overturned a lot of what had been the “common wisdom” with regard to Pluto. The pictures and data provided surprise after surprise, and scientists will be poring over it for decades to come. Meanwhile, New Horizons is not finished. It’s on its way now to a flyby date with Kuiper Object 2014 MU69 (Ultima Thule) in early 2019, and as long as it is funded, it can continue operating and sending data perhaps into the 2030s. Stern and Grinspoon might have another book on tap.

I for one would immediately pick it up. Chasing New Horizons is top notch non-fiction. It does what the best popular science should do—impart fascinating information but without leaving out the human passion driving all the numbers and data, teaching as it also inspires. Highly recommended.

This book was full of science yet exciting and easy to read & understand. Fascinating look inside NASA.

Wonderful book about an amazing space mission

I loved this book. There are no spoilers here, the mission to explore Pluto was a success. And even though I knew this, the authors nonetheless were able to create a sense of drama about the program; the mission itself and the political events surrounding it. Any science in the book was well-explained. One of the reasons for the quality of the book is the knowledge and expertise of the authors. Alan Stern is the principal investigator of New Horizons and David Grinspoon had already written three books. With a dramatic story like the New Horizons mission and great authors, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in science or space exploration.

Fascinating insider's experience from the mission conception to reaching Pluto! I totally enjoyed reading 'Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto' by Alan Stern. I learned so much about NASA and how missions come about within the committee red-tape. They managed to bypass the usual pat on the head to actually getting folks excited about the need to explore the remainder of the planets in our solar system. It is somewhat fascinating how when the concept was first developing that Pluto was considered a planet. Irregardless that Pluto has been reclassified.. man was finally able to visually see this enigmatic rock within reach of Earth!

I'm hopeful that others will be inspired as I am after reading Alan Stern's compelling argument that mankind must continue to explore and hopefully.. begin sending humans beyond our moon. At this point.. I'd just love to see the moon with permanent inhabitants.

As a lifelong space geek, I wanted so badly to absolutely love this book and read about the Pluto mission. However, while the subject was so fantastically interesting, the writing left something to be desired. The first half of the book - before the mission launched into space - reads like just lists of names and job descriptions. And throughout, the switching between third and first person story telling is disjarring, as the layout doesn't always make it clear who talking. It does pick up a lot as the book gets closer to the Pluto flyby and its easy to get caught up in the excitement of mission success - but it wasn't enough to lift the entire book up in rating for me.

Thanks to the publisher for providing an ARC through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.