This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

Anyway, so I'm talking today with Alan Stern and David Grinspan here with a new book

Chasing New Horizons, which you can see in the backdrop there. They're at the

magnificent Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles on their book tour, right? You're on a book tour now.

We are.

So the book is great. You guys read it. I just listened to it on audio the last couple of days.

It's a good read. It's a good adventure story and I guess one of the first things I would say is anybody that wants to go into the adventure of planetary

planetary exploration really should read this book because first of all if you have this idea

that all you do is give high fives every time there's an encounter and the rest of the

time you're just kind of hanging out waiting for this to happen oh my. I mean the you know the endless hours of

bureaucracy and paperwork I was just stunned by this and I mean you must have the

patience of Job before you get to that close encounter day.

It's all about delayed gratification.

Totally.

And you know, the other impression I had though,

you know, just sort of going through the number of things that can go wrong,

it's amazing any of these

spacecraft missions from Pioneer on have ever succeeded. I mean as a back of the

envelope calculation how many things could go wrong that would be catastrophic and end the

mission. There are probably many dozens of ways that that can go bad and that's the

trick to spaceflight of course is is to think through all the angles and what can go wrong and make sure

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