An A/CC Special Topic:

• "The Kuipers Beckon As Pluto Mission Funded," 3 March SpaceDaily article
• "Race Against Time: Long Road to Pluto and Why We're Going," 27 Feb. Space.com article
• "Pluto Mission a Go! Initial Funding Secured," 26 Feb. Space.com 3-part article

• "Pluto or Bust," 11 Nov. U.S. News & World Report article (posted 2 Nov.)
• "Pluto Should we go there?," 31 Oct. Fla. Today article, accompanied by a brief science review, "Questions about Pluto continue to mount"
• "NASA: Where To From Here," 3-page 25 Oct. SpaceDaily article, reviews funding situation for New Horizons and a new comet sample return mission, as well as Hubble telescope extension-termination, electric propulsion development, and other NASA funding issues
• "Pluto Mission Gets Boost in Congress," 10 Oct. Sky & Tel. article
• "House panel approves increased NASA funding," 9 Oct. Fla. Today article
• "Full Committee Reports FY03 VA-HUD Appropriations Bill," 9 Oct. House Appropriations Comm. news release
• "The Bizarre 'Pluto War' Is Almost Over At Last, And Pluto Is Winning," 9 Oct. SpaceDaily article
• "Congressional Subcommittee Votes to Fund Pluto-Kuiper Belt and Europa Missions," 8 Oct. Planetary Soc. article
• In SpaceDaily's coverage of the Contour mission failure, some thought is also given to how the already threatened New Horizons mission might be affected, since both missions are assigned to management by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. See Bruce Moomaw's 25 Aug. and 4 Sept. articles.
• On 27 July it was reported that, Word has reached NASA Watch that an effort is underway whereby the New Horizons mission will be terminated and then recompeted.
• UPI reported 21 May that "backers [are] confident of funding revival" for the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt.
  
• An unbylined 2 May report on SpaceDaily states that "Washington sources have confirmed reports first published by NASA Watch that both parties in Congress are teetering on defying the White House [and NASA] and funding $120 million to begin development of the New Horizons Pluto probe."
• Keith Cowing reported on SpaceRef.com on 22 April that the U.S. House of Representatives may add $60 million to the NASA budget tied specifically to the otherwise unfunded New Horizons misison, but this amount is "only half of what would be needed in FY2003 to conduct the Pluto mission as currently planned."
• The Planetary Society has a 12 April message urging Congress to restore funding for the Pluto/Kuiper mission as well as the Europa orbiter.
• Space.com on 2 April reported that NASA's Space Science Advisory Committee's Solar System Exploration Subcommittee (SSES) in a 31 March 2002 letter to NASA has come down solidly in support of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. See SpaceRef.com for a copy of the committee report posted 3 April.

• Aviation Week & Space Technology 19 August 2002 editorial
• Letter 30 July 2002 from John Stansberry, co-author of the 1999 Icarus article, "The Fate of Pluto's Atmosphere"
• "Journey to the Farthest Planet" [alternate link] by S. Alan Stern, the mission's principal investigator, full text from the Scientific American May 2002 issue
• Boston Globe 20 April 2002 editorial, "Plodding toward Pluto"
• "Exploring Pluto-Charon and the Kuiper Belt," 22 March 2002 at SpaceDaily, by Alan Stern, Dir., SwRI Dept. of Space Studies and New Horizons Principal Investigator. He says, In essence, the Kuiper Belt has turned out to be the big brother to the asteroid belt, with far more objects, and notably far more large objects (over 100 kilometer in size) than the asteroid belt... [It] is estimated that the Kuiper Belt contains over 100,000 KBOs larger than 100 kilometers across.
• "Plutonium's Promise Will Find Pluto Left Out in the Cold," personal opinion 20 Feb. 2002 at SpaceDaily by Ralph L. McNutt, Jr. (Chief Scientist, JHU/APL Space Dept.)
• Bruce Moomaw at SpaceDaily about New Horizons: "A Plutonic Commitment to Space" (11 Feb. 2002), "Out to the Horizon of Sol" (12 Dec. 2001); and about the previous mission cancellation: "Congress Has Pups as Bush Shoots Down Pluto Express" (5 March 2001)
• SwRI editorials collection, including this from Aviation Week & Space Technology: The political reality today may be that...it is [public] support for unmanned space science missions that keeps NASA alive and without these probes there might be no space station.

• There is a strong sense in the U.S. Congress that a Pluto mission shouldn't be delayed, and voters can contact their Congressional delegation about this.
• Online petition drives: Ted A. Nelson II's www.plutomission.com & the Planetary Society's Help Save the Missions page