LAUREL, Maryland, July 9 — 2001. That’s the year Glen Fountain took the reins of what would become one of NASA’s most celebrated deep-space missions. By the numbers, his tenure as project manager for the New Horizons mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory spanned from 2001 until his retirement in 2019.
The bottom line: Fountain oversaw the spacecraft from blueprint to the edge of the solar system, delivering the first close-up images of Pluto and then pushing onward to a Kuiper Belt object. Fountain, an American aerospace engineer born in 1949, brought a career’s worth of planetary science experience to the job.
He joined APL in 1971, the same year he earned his B.S. in physics from the University of Maryland. A 1975 M.S. in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins University followed. His resume includes stints on the Voyager program, the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn, and the MESSENGER mission to Mercury.
Each of those projects pushed the boundaries of what robotic spacecraft could do.
Managing the mission
For New Horizons, Fountain’s job was not glamorous. He managed the budget, the schedule, and a team of hundreds of engineers and scientists. The figure that matters: the spacecraft was designed, built, tested, launched, and operated under his watch.
That included the Pluto flyby in 2015 and the flyby of Arrokoth, a Kuiper Belt object, in 2019. The mission did not stop when the spacecraft left Earth.
Fountain was responsible for operations through both encounters. NASA recognized his work with the Exceptional Public Service Medal in 2016. That award typically goes to individuals whose contributions to the agency’s mission are substantial but not necessarily in the public eye.
Fountain’s role fit that description. He was not the face of New Horizons — that was principal investigator Alan Stern — but he was the person who kept the project on track and under budget through years of development and a nine-year cruise to Pluto.
He retired from APL in 2019. But retirement in the space industry often means a change in title, not a stop in work. Fountain remains a consultant for the mission.
New Horizons is still operational, still sending back data from the outer solar system, and still pushing into the Kuiper Belt. The spacecraft that Fountain helped build is now far from the Sun, and it keeps going.
What to watch next
The New Horizons team is now searching for a third flyby target. The spacecraft has enough power and propellant for at least another decade of operations. Fountain’s consulting role means his experience — the budget management, the schedule discipline, the engineering judgment — is still available to the current team.
For a mission that has already rewritten the textbooks on Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, that continuity matters. The bottom line: the engineer who got the spacecraft to Pluto is still helping it find its next destination.
