Alan Stern Quotes

Alan Stern is an American planetary scientist and space exploration advocate. He has been involved in various NASA missions, including the New Horizons mission that successfully explored Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Stern's work has contributed to our understanding of the outer solar system and the quest for knowledge beyond Earth.

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

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.

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.

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

No one working as an astronomer is shackled in chains. This is a tremendous profession. There are lots of neat people, and you get to do cool things. If I had to say something negative, it's that there's often a whole lot of travel that takes me away from my children. That can be a bummer a lot of times.

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.

Having a diverse suite of U.S.-manned spaceflight ... -Alan Stern

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

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.'

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.

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.

There was a time when Pluto - which NASA's New Horizons spacecraft at last explored in 2015, a mission I led - was considered the last planet. We now know there are thousands of other - possibly inhabited - planets.

The New Horizons Pluto mission will be the first mission to a binary object and will help us understand everything from the origin of Earth's moon to the physics of mass transfer between binary stars.

I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.

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.

The first mission to Mars did not expect to find craters and river valleys, and yet they did. The first mission to Jupiter didn't expect to find ocean worlds and volcano worlds, but they did.

CSF and its members believe strongly in the exploration of space of all kinds, including commercial purposes.

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a plan... -Alan Stern

Why would you listen to an astronomer about a planet?

America's space program has been the envy and inspiration of the world. It has made landmark scientific discoveries that are a lasting legacy of this nation's greatness. It has studied Earth in ways no other nation can match.

I tell public audiences, don't go to a podiatrist for brain surgery; don't go to an astronomer for planetary science.

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.

Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but ... -Alan Stern

Pluto is as far across as Manhattan to Miami, but its atmosphere is bigger than the Earth's.

How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.

We're going to find Marses and maybe Earths out in the solar system's attic of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt.

Either data supports the observations or they don'... -Alan Stern

Either data supports the observations or they don't. Voting doesn't work in science.

My field is called planetary science.... -Alan Stern

My field is called planetary science.

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.

It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good about us, that we've invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system.

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.

People dig exploration.... -Alan Stern

People dig exploration.

Pluto is still active four and a half billion years into its history. It was expected that small planets like Pluto would cool off long ago and not still be showing geological activity. Pluto is, in fact, showing numerous examples of geological activity on a massive scale across the planet.

Popular Topic