Pluto sat unexplored for nearly a century after Clyde Tombaugh spotted it from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1930, and this film follows the spacecraft NASA finally sent to see it up close. Engineers and scientists who worked on New Horizons narrate the build, walking through the clean rooms where the probe was assembled before its launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The film lingers on the technical problems that had to be solved before liftoff: a communications system capable of sending data back across three billion miles, and a spacecraft built to survive years of cold, radiation, and near-total isolation in deep space. Archival control-room footage and launch footage carry much of the story, putting the viewer at the consoles where the mission was actually managed. The back half covers New Horizons' successful Jupiter flyby, used as a gravity assist toward Pluto, and previews the data the mission would eventually return about the outer solar system. It stays close to procedure and hardware rather than speculation.