NASA launched the New Horizons probe in 2006 with a single destination in mind: Pluto, a world so distant that even powerful telescopes show it as little more than a point of light. The film follows principal investigator Alan Stern and his team at the Southwest Research Institute through the years of delays and technical setbacks that preceded launch, then through the long transit across the solar system. Interviews with mission scientists explain what the spacecraft was built to measure and why a flyby, rather than orbit, was the only realistic option given the distances involved. New Horizons carried on past Pluto and its moons toward the Kuiper Belt, the band of icy bodies beyond Neptune that the mission was designed to sample if the trajectory allowed it. The footage and images returned by the probe anchor the back half of the film, giving a plain look at surfaces no spacecraft had ever photographed up close before this one reached them.