The duo inked an agreement 2 days after the NASA announcement and began assembling their team. The final proposal was due on 18 September 2001—1 week after the terrorist attacks in New York City. With APL shut down, Stern created a “war room” in a nearby hotel to put the finishing touches on it. In the end, though, it wasn't much of a competition, Weiler says. “Alan was the clear winner.”
That was just the beginning of the fight. The Bush administration had installed a new NASA administrator, Sean O'Keefe, who was no fan of the mission, and was instead pushing the idea of nuclear fission–powered spacecraft. When the federal budget request for 2003 came out, in February 2002, the administration had zeroed out the Pluto mission, effectively canceling it.
Weiler challenged Stern to rally planetary scientists' support for the mission in the decadal survey, a once-a-decade, prioritized wish list that's meant to reflect science's unified voice. For months, Stern lobbied tirelessly. When the report appeared in July 2002, the Pluto mission held the top spot in the medium-size mission category, ahead of missions to the moon and to Jupiter. “That's what really broke the logjam,” Weiler says. “My administration was not going to fight that.”
Stern's team raced to build New Horizons before the gravity assist window closed. The finished spacecraft carried seven instruments, including a student-built interplanetary dust counter and a sensor to measure the energy of particles escaping from Pluto's atmosphere. Novelties were also stowed aboard: cremated ashes of Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh; an old U.S. stamp of Pluto with the caption “Not yet explored”; a piece of SpaceShipOne, private space company Virgin Galactic's first suborbital space vehicle; and two quarters: one from Maryland, whose Senator Barbara Mikulski had given the mission crucial support at its lowest ebb, and one from Florida, where then-Governor Jeb Bush had signed off on the launch of the plutonium-laden spacecraft.