Hello and welcome to the Origins podcast. I'm Lawrence Krause. Alan Stern is one of the most

experienced explorers of deep space we have in the United States today. He's been involved in

24 missions on the space shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as being PI of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.

He's chief scientist on the Moon Explorer mission.

Andy was associate administrator of NASA.

I've known Alan for some time, and he's excited and energetic,

and he has what it takes to generate and maintain the enthusiasm and organization necessary

for decades of exhausting work involved in space exploration.

I wanted to talk to him about the challenges of doing deep space missions

and also the promises and opportunities they provide for learning about ourselves.

Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program immediately at patreon.com

slash Origins Podcast.

I hope you enjoy this show. Alan, it's great to have you here. Thanks so much for coming.

I'm looking forward to it, Lawrence. Great to be here.

And before we do anything, I want to show your book because I'm a big fan of it and the story that it tells.

And we'll be talking about this. So you just gave it to me too. So it's great to have my own sign copy. Thanks,

I'm sure you'll appreciate this. I call that my hundred lost weekends because it was two years of

weekends. It's a good read and people should read it before. And the story that it tells us is one

we're going to talk about, which is this boldly going where no one has gone before, literally.

So let me start.

In fact, there's a picture on here. Pluto, planet or not? Planet. Me too. Now, why do you think it's a planet? Because my daughter did her grade four project on Pluto, and I thought,

there's no way I'm going to make her go back to grade four and redo that. But why is the

...