Charles Krauthammer: Pluto flight proves human race still can soar

We need a pick-me-up. Amid the vandalizing of Palmyra, the imminent extinction of the northern white rhino, plague and pestilence and, by God, Shark Week – where can humanity turn for uplift?

Meet New Horizons, arriving at Pluto on Tuesday. Small and light, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, it left Earth with such velocity that it shot past our moon in nine hours. A speeding bullet the size of a Steinway, it has flown 9 1/2 years to the outer edges of the solar system.

To Pluto, the now-demoted “dwarf planet” that lives beyond the Original Eight in the far distant “third zone” of the solar system – the Kuiper Belt, an unimaginably huge ring of rocks and ice and sundry debris where the dwarf is king.

After 3 billion miles, New Horizons will on Tuesday shoot right through Pluto’s mini-planetary system of five moons, the magnificently named Charon, Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos.

Why through? Because, while the other planets lie on roughly the same plane, Pluto and its moon system stick up at an angle to that plane like a giant archery target. New Horizons gets one pass, going straight by the bull’s-eye. No orbiting around, no lingering for months or even years to photograph and study.

No mulligans. And no navigating. Can’t do that when it takes 4 1/2 hours for a message from Earth to arrive. This is a preprogrammed, single-take, nine-day deal.

For what? First, for the science, the coming avalanche of new knowledge. Remember: We didn’t even know there was a Pluto until 85 years ago when astronomer Clyde Tombaugh from Burdett, Kan., found a strange tiny dot moving across the star field.

Today we still know practically nothing. In fact, two of the five moons were not discovered until after New Horizons was launched. And yet next week we will see an entirely new world come to life.

“We’re not planning to rewrite any textbooks,” said principal investigator Alan Stern in a splendid New York Times documentary on the mission. “We’re planning to write them from scratch.”

Then there’s the romance. The Pluto flyby caps a half-century of solar system exploration that has yielded staggering new wonders. Such as Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, with its vast subterranean ocean under a crust of surface ice, the most inviting potential habitat for extraterrestrial life that human beings will ever reach.

Yes, ever. Promising exoplanets – the ones circling distant stars that we deduce might offer a Goldilocks zone suitable for water-based life – are being discovered by the week. But they are unreachable. The journey to even the nearest would, at New Horizons’ speed, take 280,000 years. Even mere communication would be absurdly difficult. A single exchange of greetings – “Hi there,” followed by “Back at you, brother” – would take a generation.

Every ounce of superfluous weight has been stripped from New Horizons to give it more speed and pack more instruments. Yet there was one concession to poetry. New Horizons is carrying some of Tombaugh’s ashes. After all, he found the dot. Not only will he fly by his netherworldly discovery, notes Carter Emmart of the American Museum of Natural History, he will become the first human being to have his remains carried beyond the solar system.

For the wretched race of beings we surely are, we do, on occasion, manage to soar.

This story was originally published July 10, 2015 at 5:19 PM with the headline "Charles Krauthammer: Pluto flight proves human race still can soar."