Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) crosses her fingers for a successful Pluto flyby.

The member of Congress who played the biggest role in getting New Horizons funded and launched paid a visit to the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) on Monday (April 13) to wish the team the best for the upcoming flyby.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...