Quotes from Alan Stern

By going to Pluto, we have a chance to anchor, with real data, models of the early evolution of Earth's atmosphere.

Pluto is the new Mars.

There are lots of really interesting little planets out there in the Kuiper Belt, but Pluto's the only one that's got all the cool attributes.

Just because Pluto or comets aren't as big as Jupiter doesn't mean they are not scientifically important - indeed, just the reverse is often true. Sometimes, great things come in small packages.

Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.

Most of the oceans in the Solar System are deep beneath ice shelves.

I think when people see Pluto revealed by New Horizons, its satellite system, its complex surface, its atmosphere, I think they'll have a hard time saying 'That's not a planet' because it obviously will be, and I think most people are already coming to that opinion anyway, but I think that's really going to drive it home viscerally.

A miniature poodle is not not a dog just because it's miniature.

Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight systems to access space is inherently robust.

Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.

A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.

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.

People dig exploration.

If you go to planetary science meetings and hear technical talks on Pluto, you will hear experts calling it a planet every day.

As a planetary scientist, I don't know what else to call Pluto: It's big and round and thousands of miles wide.

We're in the space exploration business, and the outer solar system is a wild, wooly place. We haven't explored it very well.

I'm the one who originally coined the term 'dwarf planet,' back in the nineteen-nineties.

People know a planet when they see one, and I think that's a pretty darn good test, in fact, for planethood.

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.

People ask, 'What are the scientific questions you're going to answer?' New Horizons doesn't have any of those; it's purely about raw exploration... We're not 'rewriting the textbook' - we're writing the textbook from scratch.

Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.

Whether there's even an ocean on Pluto deep inside is a question I hope New Horizons can address in indirect ways.

Science is really about individual experts reaching a consensus.

I think if you were between maybe 6 and 16, there was nothing like Apollo, and I wonder if there can be something like that again. We'll just have to see.