Video: Marc Buie, New Horizons Occultation Team Lead (members only)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ferried a multinational crew into orbit at the break of dawn Friday with a spectacular sky-lighting launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, dazzling early risers along the East Coast with a flawless start to a planned six-month expedition on the International Space Station.

It’s Steve Clarke’s job to merge the goals of space scientists with NASA’s strategic plans for exploring the solar system, two factors which are not always in lock-step, as the space agency seeks to return humans to the moon, and eventually send astronauts to Mars.

Ground observations of the New Horizons spacecraft’s next target last month revealed the distant object, lurking in the outer solar system more than four billion miles from Earth, might have an unconventional elongated shape, or even consist of two icy bodies orbiting one another in an age-old cosmic dance.