Edward C. Stone

person · earth

The physicist who served as Voyager project scientist from 1972 — five years before launch — until he stepped down in 2022, an unbroken tenure of half a century over a single mission that has no obvious parallel in spaceflight. He was also director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for eleven years in the 1990s. His role in the Voyager record is partly scientific and partly evidential: he was the person who repeatedly declined to declare an interstellar crossing until the plasma data supported it, which is why the announcement of Voyager 1's 2012 crossing was made in September 2013 rather than in 2012. He died in June 2024.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.