By the end of the third week of the month, all of the testing that we'd planned to complete at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center had wrapped up. Simply put, there wasn't much more we could do for New Horizons in Maryland - where the spacecraft had been born, and where it had been thoroughly tested.

After a year in assembly and initial test at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL), and then 14 weeks of environmental testing at Goddard Space Flight Center, it was time to move New Horizons south, to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and Cape Canaveral.

New Horizons received its "GO" to ship to the Cape at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 22, after a formal, in-depth 11-hour review of testing status and shipping plans that NASA calls the "Pre-Ship Review." It had taken us just 46 months from proposal selection to reach this point.

Because of advance planning, it was possible to begin moving ground support equipment down the KSC the same day that we received permission to ship. APL and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) personnel also began to move, some by car, some by air.

By Friday, Sept. 23, a receiving crew was in place at KSC and had set up all of the necessary facilities needed to care for New Horizons when it arrived. KSC personnel played a big role in making this happen, beginning literally three years before with a series of planning meetings that described every detail of shipping and receiving, the activities to prepare New Horizons for launch, and contingency preparations (such as a hurricane plan for sheltering our baby in case the Cape was hit by a late-season monster storm).

To prepare it for shipment, New Horizons was placed in its sturdy, clean-room-like shipping container on Thursday, Sept. 22. The container was then put under a continuous purge by dry, surgically clean nitrogen gas designed to keep the spacecraft systems and instrument payload clean, dry, and in a pristine condition.

On Friday evening, the shipment of the spacecraft itself began. This carefully orchestrated operation was overseen by the spacecraft's lead mechanical engineer and shipping czar, Steve Vernon, who led a roughly 15-person APL shipping crew.

The first leg of the journey was by caravan to Andrews Air Force Base, southeast of Washington, D.C. Our six-vehicle caravan, replete with police escort, spacecraft support equipment, a backup nitrogen purge system, technicians, camera crew, and PI, left NASA Goddard at 8 p.m.

New Horizons itself rode in its shipping container, on an "air ride" cushioned truck. As the truck pulled out of Building 29's westward facing loading dock, I noticed the constellations and realized Pluto was somewhere in the waning twilight nearly straight ahead on the horizon. A fitting departure, I thought, "We're kind of starting our long trip to Pluto right here."

The 35-minute transit to Andrews - in traffic - was probably the most dangerous and least controllable step of the journey. Although the transit went well, a moment of "excitement" was provided by some (forever to be anonymous) D.C. driver who swept across three lanes of traffic without notice, sliding between our lead police car and the air ride truck with our one-of-a-kind, $200+ million baby in it.

That fellow doesn't know it, but he could have single-handedly botched the exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Predictably, our police escorts couldn't break off from the convoy to give that yahoo a ticket, or even a warning. He was in and out of our lives in under 20 seconds, vanishing into the dark and the nighttime traffic.

Ready for Takeoff

Once we arrived at Andrews and cleared the entry gate security checks, the spacecraft and all of its support equipment were carefully transferred to a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III from the 315th Reserve Air Lift Wing at Charleston Air Force Base, South Carolina.

The C-17 is an impressive airplane. I have flown on C-130s both in the U.S. and down to Antarctica, and I've seen C-141s and C-5As at air shows. But the Globemaster is the belle of the ball when it comes to heavy military transports. The C-17 is fully modern - from its well- engineered payload-bay loading systems to its glass cockpit requiring only a two-person crew. And it is huge - 174 feet long, with a 169-foot wingspan, and a height of 55 feet.

New Horizons was expertly loaded aboard our C-17 by a combined Air Force-APL crew directed by C-17 loadmaster Sgt. Brian Farmintino and Vernon. Five careful fork lifts later, the spacecraft and support gear were aboard the C-17. By the time everything was secured for flight and the purge system reactivated, it was almost 1 a.m. on Saturday. Sept. 24.

Soon, the Globemaster's cargo gate was raised and the aircraft's four giant Pratt and Whitney F117-PW-100 engines were started. After a short safety briefing to the APL crew and myself (and yes, we had to turn off our cell phones), we rolled. Steve Vernon and I sat together for takeoff. Just after the C-17 rotated off the runway, one of us (I can't recall who) said, "Next time New Horizons lifts off, we won't be there, will we?"

Within minutes, we'd taken the active runway and departed to the north, turned over D.C., and headed south, toward Florida, just under two hours and 750 miles ahead.

Shortly after liftoff, I was invited to fly the remainder of the flight in the cockpit's jump seat. As a general aviation pilot with 25 years of experience, a former WB-57 and F-18 flyer, and an aviation nut of the first rank, it took me about 300 milliseconds to say yes to the cockpit offer!

Up on the flight deck were Col. Brian Faulkner and Maj. Ed Schmidt. Both men are reservists, who had flown over three dozen C-17 missions to Iraq as a part of their duties. Col. Faulkner had also flown the Mars Climate Orbiter from JPL to the Cape in 1998.

The C-17's cockpit looks a lot like the layout of space shuttle simulators I have "flown" in, with big CRTs arranged symmetrically on either side of the center console, fighter-like sticks at each pilot station, and an array of overhead and aft panels studded with switches and circuit breakers.

The sky was clear and as smooth as glass as we flew down the Atlantic coast, passing Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, and a host of smaller seaboard towns. By 2:30 a.m., Orlando air traffic control center had handed us off to KSC for a landing on the shuttle runway.

The nighttime approach into KSC's Runway 15 aboard the C-17 was really a treat, and the flight crew and I talked about the fact that this is something like how it looks to land a shuttle at night in Florida as we flew down the approach corridor and onto the 15,000-foot runway designed for returning space planes. Maj. Schmidt flew the approach from the right seat and set us down as smoothly as I have ever been landed anywhere�and far more smoothly than the commercial flight I took back to Maryland the next day.

At 02:41 we were wheels down, and 15 minutes later, we were out of the aircraft on the ramp, ready to begin unloading humankind's first spaceship to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt from its Globemaster transport.

As I stepped off the aircraft, KSC's Chuck Tatro and a crowd of perhaps 40 NASA, APL and contractor personnel greeted us in the warm, humid Florida night. KSC and APL photo teams emerged to document the spacecraft's arrival. Friends like APL Project Manager Glen Fountain and his assistant, Jo-Anne Kierzkowski, were there as well. The project was really on the ground at KSC!

"Welcome to the launch site, Dr. Stern," Tatro said. It was simultaneously sublime and surreal. A shiver ran up my spine. After 17 years of work, a Pluto mission had finally arrived at the Cape .

I thought to myself, T-minus 110 days and counting . . .

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