Billions of miles away, a spacecraft shaped like a grand piano is speeding into the outer solar system carrying a 1991 postage stamp, a piece of SpaceShipOne, and the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered Pluto. This episode tells the life story of New Horizons, from a 1992 phone call asking Tombaugh for permission to visit his planet, through the political fight that revived a cancelled mission, to the historic flybys of Pluto and Arrokoth.

We explain why the 2006 launch had a 23-day window tied to a Jupiter gravity assist, how a spare Cassini radioisotope thermoelectric generator powers the probe on just a few hundred watts, and the thermal design that keeps it warm near absolute zero. We revisit the safe-mode scare ten days before the Pluto encounter, the 22 hours of planned radio silence during closest approach, and the 15-month download of data at dial-up speeds. We also cover what the probe found at Pluto, the Hubble search that identified its next target, and the science it continues to do at the edge of the solar system.

• Alan Stern’s push to get the mission ranked in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey
• Leaving Earth at over 36,000 miles per hour and passing the Moon’s orbit in nine hours
• Tombaugh Regio, water-ice mountains, and Pluto’s tumbling small moons
• Measurements of the hydrogen wall, the cosmic optical background, and an interstellar parallax experiment
• The 2026 budget debate, continuation into the 2030s, and the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter