CANADA: Alan Stern, the human engine of the New Horizons mission to Pluto was among the 12 winners in 9 groups who were given Smithsonian Magazine’s American Ingenuity Awards on Thursday night. When noted that the Pluto meeting was the largest science story of the year, Stern upped the ante and remarked that it is in fact “The largest of the decade”But Is that true?
There have been larger, more compelling achievement in this decade which dealt with technology and science. Few of them are, the oil spill of 2010 ( if it’s counted in this decade), the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. The former being an environment and engineering story, the later was a public health disaster.
But, if Stern was referring to space stories and achievements, and Pluto definitely is a bigger one. The other among space stories is Rosetta.
NASA’s effort to find a path forward in the post-shuttle era really has been a slow-moving and difficult (some would decide on more brutal adjectives) spectacle. The development of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and other “New Space†ventures looks historic in my eyes, but that’s been spread out over several years and so lacks the Holy Cow nature of the Pluto meeting of July 14.
When he took the stage to accept the award, Stern alluded to the fact that Pluto was demoted through an international astronomic organization to “dwarf planet†status.
