opportunity to fly on the Space Shuttle. His research has focused on studies of our solar system's Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, comets, the satellites of the outer planets, Pluto, and the search for evidence of planetary systems around other stars. He has also worked on spacecraft rendezvous theory, terrestrial polar mesospheric clouds, galactic astrophysics, and studies of tenuous satellite atmospheres, including the atmosphere of the Moon. In 2007, Stern was listed among Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World. On August 27, 2008 Stern was elected to the Board of Directors of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. In 2015, Stern was the recipient of Smithsonian Magazine'''s American Ingenuity Award in the Physical Sciences category. On October 7, 2016, Stern was inducted into the Colorado Space Hall of Fame. Inspiration for Pluto/Kuiper belt mission On June 14, 2007, in an address to the Smithsonian Institution for their "Exploring the Solar System Lecture Series", Stern commented on the New Horizons mission: Private sector experience After completing a master's degree in aerospace engineering Stern spent seven years as an aerospace systems engineer, concentrating on spacecraft and payload systems at the NASA Johnson Space Center, Martin Marietta Aerospace, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado. Stern is currently active as a consultant for private sector space efforts and has stated: On June 18, 2008, Stern joined Odyssey Moon Limited (Isle of Man), a private industry effort, as a part-time Science Mission Director/consultant in their efforts to launch a robotic mission to the Earth's Moon by participating in the $30 Million Google Lunar X-Prize competition. In December 2008, Stern joined Blue Origin, a company that was founded by Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos as an independent representative for research and education Missions. The company has stated that its objective is to develop a new vertical-take-off, vertical-landing vehicle known as New Shepard that is designed to take a small number of astronauts on a sub-orbital journey into space and reduce the cost of space transportation. The company is located in Kent, Washington and has flight tested some hardware. In 2012, Stern co-founded Uwingu. Space science mission Stern has extensive experience in instrument development, with a strong concentration in ultraviolet technologies. Stern is a principal investigator (PI) in NASA's UV sounding rocket program, and was the project scientist on a Shuttle-deployable SPARTAN astronomical satellite. He was the PI