Nasa'S Pluto Mission

As spectacular pictures slowly trickle back from an enormously distant New Horizons spacecraft, which shot through the Pluto-Charon system on 14 July 2015, it is easy to think that this mission was inevitable-the capstone to the US's pioneering exploration of the solar system. But it took 17 difficult years to get from the first proposal to launch day, 19 January 2006. On the way, there were many changes of course and three outright cancellations. Far from being inevitable, the Pluto mission was saved from oblivion several times by dogged advocacy, protests by scientists and the public, political intervention by Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), and a timely endorsement by the National Academies.