New Horizons launches toward Pluto in 2006 as the first mission ever sent to the Kuiper Belt, the vast ring of icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune that scientists call the solar system's third zone. Built and operated by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, the spacecraft spends nine years crossing the solar system before its 2015 flyby of Pluto and its moon Charon. The film interviews the scientists behind the mission, including Dr. James Green, John Spencer, Fran Bagenal, and Mark Showalter, who explain why Pluto stayed a blur even to the Hubble Space Telescope and what a close pass could finally reveal about its surface, atmosphere, and geology. It traces the mission's origins inside NASA's New Frontiers Program and the decade of engineering required to get a piano-sized probe to a target three billion miles away with no chance for a second attempt. The stakes are straightforward: one flyby, one shot at the only unvisited planet-sized object left in the solar system.