When New Horizons roared into a blue Florida sky on 18 January 2006, it was met with excitement and frustration in equal measure: excitement because, after so many fruitless attempts to send a spacecraft to Pluto — ranging from the ill - fated Pluto Fast Flyby (PFF) to the Pluto Kuiper Express (PKE), which breathed their last in ferocious NASA budget cuts in the 1990s and at the turn of the millennium — a mission to
explore the last of the nine «traditional»
planets in the Solar System was underway, tempered with frustration that it would
require such a long period of time in order to reach its quarry.