Alan Stern is the co-author of of the recently released “Chasing New Horizons, Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,” and also an engineer and planetary scientist, who has held executive roles at NASA and who leads New Horizons, NASA's mission to the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt. He has served as a consultant to private space exploration. projects, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and he is a co-founder of Worldview Enterprises, which has raised $42 million to provide an accessible, affordable way to access near-space with high-altitude balloons.