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.
Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we've seen in the solar system.
Are governments the only entities that can build human spacecraft? No - actually, every human spacecraft ever built for NASA was built by private industry.
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.
How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun? There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars.
Just because Pluto orbits with many other dwarf planets doesn't change what it is, just as whether an object is a mountain or not doesn't depend on whether it's in a group or in isolation.
It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like 'Star Trek' and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet or a star or a comet or an asteroid.
I've been on 26 space missions; they range from suborbital to orbital to shuttle experiments to planetary missions.
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.
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.
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.
No one predicted Mercury would be a planetary core with the mantle stripped off. No one predicted volcanoes on the Jovian moons, or oceans on the inside of them. I can tell you, for every single planet, huge 'we never guessed that' things.