[qrybam]

This is incredible. Not just because of the engineering that went into such a long lived machine, but also because of the ingenuity of the teams that have looked after this mission and those currently working on it.

Half a century of operation. Bits of data, like gold dust, peppering our radio telescopes with telemetry from the edges of our protective solar shell, and beyond.

Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated, but the pushing of boundaries of our understanding is awe inspiring. It carries the symbolism of some of the best parts of humanity’s desire to explore.

This sort of news, at least for me, is an antidote to the darker side of our species. It reinvigorates my hope in what we can achieve when working together.

Thank you to NASA and the scientific community at large.

[simpaticoder]

>Half a century of operation.

The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entire time, as has Caltech.

There are many institutions (Sears), and world superpowers (USSR) from 50 years ago that seemed like they would dominate forever, but are gone.

[tesseract2]

Yes, indeed, when so many projects get started and stopped, this continuity is notable, and we need more of this.

And then, this puts me in absolute awe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara

A residential university that ran for ~750 years. What a marvelous achievement of human culture and spirit!

It survived multiple royal dynasties.

[troyvit]

This is a really good point, especially for a country that is so young and that has grown so fast. Maybe the instability resulting from that growth is yet to come but it doesn't detract from what NASA and JPL have accomplished so far.

[sheepscreek]

> especially for a country that is so young and that has grown so fast

USA gained independence 247 years ago. That puts it in a minority of countries that have been sovereign as long or longer.

[Rebelgecko]

IIRC a good chunk of the voyager team is "first generation"

[dredmorbius]

The thought occurred to me some years ago that a key aspect of governmental institutions is their durability, particularly in the face of adversarial politics. Though the inefficiency of government services is quite often grossly exaggerated, there's much consideration which has to be made of the trade-offs between efficiency and durability.

This should be front-of-mind whenever someone proposes a start-up to address some long-standing social, societal, and/or political issues:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12345506>

The other institutional forms which seem to tend toward durability are educational and religious institutions. Which often overlap considerably.

[giovannibonetti]

> The thought occurred to me some years ago that a key aspect of governmental institutions is their durability, particularly in the face of adversarial politics. Though the inefficiency of government services is quite often grossly exaggerated, there's much consideration which has to be made of the trade-offs between efficiency and durability.

Governmental institutions are durable even when they are detrimental to society, as long as the government has enough police and military might to prevent insurrections. The society must put up with grossly inefficient institutions simply because the government has a monopoly on some sectors.

[dredmorbius]

Durability, as with virtually any other characteristic or technique, has two edges. However where it is useful to have, it is indeed useful to have.

As to the other substance of your comment, I suspect you would benefit from reading this and its references: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37366751>

[nickik]

Education on an ongoing project is far easier then rebuilding fresh, even with better science and engineering.

We often see this in infrastructure, like train electrification, tunnel boring and so on. Trams is a good one, so many cities got ride of their tram system, 50 years later they want to build it again and many of them issues.

[slingnow]

You're going to be blown away when you discover people have been reliably passing down information to future generations for many many centuries.

[ethanbond]

"Reliably passing down information" includes a lot of stuff a lot less impressive than "reliably passing down the information required to keep operational a spacecraft mid-flight at the edge of our solar system."

[SoftTalker]

Well the systems controlling Voyager are quite simple, being 1970s technology. Obscure by today's standards perhaps, but not terribly complicated. 70KB of memory, programmed in Fortran and probably some amount of machine or assembly code.

Edit: apparently, due to the post-Apollo budget environment in the 1970s, the Voyager program had to keep costs down so while some new systems were developed, they also reused technology from the Viking program, not even updating or enhancing it.

"The Voyager CCS and Viking CCS would ultimately have the same amount of memory (just under 70kB) despite the routines and programs for Voyager being much more complex. In-flight programming allowed for new routines and programs to be uploaded regularly in non-volatile memory and eliminated the need for large amounts of memory to be required onboard."

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-annive...

[simpaticoder]

I didn't take the GP seriously because of this. Papyrus and clay and stone carvings do not equal operating a network of brittle, bespoke devices across the scale of a solar system. The existence of language, or writing, or even cathedrals or pyramids, do not eclipse this accomplishment. The odds of losing control of a system is proportional to both time and complexity of the system, and the GP ignores the latter factor.

[recursive]

How are you measuring reliability? I actually would be kind of blown away if this was actually true.

[brigadier132]

"Reliably" passing down information for future generations is a recent phenomenon. Just go and look at the history of mathematics and there were multiple periods where information was lost and rediscovered.

[skulk]

The mastery of reliably passing down information is likely older than anything you've read.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas

> The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of elaborate mnemonic techniques.

That's at least 4000 years of lossless transmission.

[brigadier132]

We are talking past each other, I would not consider a few religions being able to pass down information about that specific religion to future generations as humanity as a whole being able to pass down information reliably. Especially given that the "Vedas" is wholly useless information while things like the Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered. We've only recently rediscovered how Romans created concrete?

Also given humanity has existed for many years longer than 4000 years and 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive.

[ClumsyPilot]

> Pythagorean theorem were discovered, lost, then rediscovered.

And documentation to an average software project is lost in 1 year.

> 4000 years really only represents 160 generations of humans I don't consider that impressive

But 3 generations at Nasa is?

[ClumsyPilot]

We literally have clay tablets from ancient babylon and books that are thoisands of years old. We have traditional crafts like blacksmiths and pottery that were taught for thousands of years.

Conoaring this to 3 generations ia peak absurdity

[palijer]

This is a great read digging into the team that I loved. I wonder how many of the core team are still there.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/the-loyal-engine...

>Over decades, the crew members who have remained have forgone promotions, the lure of nearby Silicon Valley and, more recently, retirement, to stay with the spacecraft. NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook.

[ianlevesque]

> NASA funding, which peaked during the Apollo program in the 1960s, has dwindled, making it next to impossible to recruit young computer-science majors away from the likes of Google and Facebook.

This problem can be attacked in a couple of ways, one way is to increase compensation sure, but another is to make it possible to have healthcare and housing on the salary they do offer. The chasm between pay and cost of living is huge and growing.

[macintux]

I've long thought universal healthcare (& UBI) would enable more people to take entrepreneurial risks, but I hadn't considered that passion jobs like NASA could also be beneficiaries.

[zrail]

UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible.

Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money and all they would do is buy drugs. And that's why we can't have nice things.

[rrdharan]

Is this about the US specifically?

There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind).

Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?

[dboreham]

> Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them

You might argue that there's more tech came out of the UK (which still has some sort of healthcare, and had free education until recently) than there should considering its population and economy size. E.g. ARM, HTML, cloned sheep... Also quite a bit of popular music came from the UK. And Harry Potter was written by a person on state benefits.

[larperdoodle]

Nowhere in the world has UBI.

The Scandinavian social safety net is excellent and I think the positive effects of that are apparent. People can take larger risks than they can in the US, but still nowhere near as large as they could with UBI

[aklemm]

Go there and look at how they live; that takes inspiration. The benefits of their social welfare are apparent in their lifestyle compared to US daily life.

And the flip: Shouldn't Scandinavia be overrun with drug-addled do-nothings if social welfare is so bad?

[mattkrause]

Sweden and Norway have about 50 Nobel Laureates between them out of 15M people.

[Muromec]

Capital is concentrated in US, so you have to go there, make some good money and if that doesn’t work — fall back into safety net of your home country.

[zrail]

I was speaking of the US, yes. I should have been more specific.

[wolverine876]

> UBI and universal healthcare would enable _so_ many people to take risks that they can't today. We would see an explosion in the arts, in fundamental science, in passion projects like this. It would be absolutely incredible.

> Except according to half of the people in charge it would mean The Wrong People would get money ...

If you look at that 'half' as people representing the status quo power, they don't want an explosion in such things that cause change.

[SoftTalker]

This is a tangental subject but I disagree. I think this is one of the many excuses used by people who feel pressure to be entreprenurial but in their hearts are not risk-takers. And that's OK -- the world needs a lot of people who work for others.

If you are a risk taker, especially a young one, lack of UBI or health insurance is not going to stop you. It never has in the past, when those things didn't exist.

[jwells89]

I think there’s a substantial number of people who aren’t averse to calculated entrepreneurial risk specifically, where negative outcomes are more predictable/bounded.

These are your types who currently bootstrap themselves and grow slowly rather than seek explosive growth by way of external funding, and I think you’d see both see this group grow and become more bold if basics like housing weren’t something that was ever in question.

[eszed]

Your "especially a young one" is doing a lot of work.

I anecdotally know a number of people, both in and out of tech, who would prefer to be independent contractors or small-business owners - in fields that they know well, and stand better than even chances of ending up with higher total compensation - but have families. Their fear of losing healthcare benefits (temporarily, whilst they get their businesses off the ground; or longer-term, should their businesses fail) keeps them working for others.

The sibling post about "calculated risk" is correct. The conclusion these folks have made (not to strike out on their own, under current circumstances) is likely the correct one, but it's a continual drag on total economic potential. Worse, this is a cost which isn't captured by calculations of what's currently spent on health-care, nor can be off-set against what a more robust social safety net would "cost". It is, nevertheless, considerable.

[gizajob]

But at the same time, rents and prices would go up so we’d soon be back where we started unless we made changes to capitalism alongside.

[umeshunni]

If that were true, we would be seeing far more entrepreneurship from countries with Universal healthcare (most of EU) or UBI (most gulf countries).

[mvdwoord]

EU taxation and regulation plays into this more I guess, outweighing the benefits of healthcare and other social benefits?

[ChicagoBoy11]

If you feel that way about this, I would highly recommend "Carrying the Fire" for you as a tremendous read. Out of all the Apollo-era books I've read, I'd say this one does the best job of mixing in really interesting technical details to really get you to peek at just how much complexity there really was (and may I even suggest giving NASSP a go so you can even try it yourself) while also doing a fantastic job at connecting it to the human and meaning side of the whole endeavor. Just a fantastic read, and sounds like you'd be the perfect target audience for it!

[pantulis]

> Not only is the technical achievement something to be celebrated

Only the _documentation_ effort must be monumental.

[quietpain]

Lets hope the _archival_ effort can match or in 50 years time we’ll have another one of these:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_and_missing_Moon_rock...

[shiroiuma]

Even with those problems, those are still far better than the (complete lack of) documentation I see in software workplaces these days.

[mdaniel]

In fairness to the workplaces that I've been in, documentation for a software stack, or even the product, from 18 months ago may as well be in Swahili for as much good as it would do any new member to the team

Just like the comparison to code quality I often see is any such NASA thread: it's a whole different ballgame when one is sending a spacecraft out, or carrying lives to space, than "I tried to send a Slack message and it did a sowweee,oopsiez"

[chpatrick]

The missing tapes are definitely one of the saddest engineering stories for me. Such an important moment in history and we just threw it away.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

Yes, and JPL makes it available.

Voyager Telecom: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4--Voyager_n...

A lot more at the top-level site and the links on the right-hand side: https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/

[ChicagoBoy11]

I've been trying to "learn" the missions more thoroughly by flying them on Orbiter and NASSP, and just the sheer amount and depth of documentation that is accessible today is truly astounding. There's something awe-inspiring about sitting and my computer and looking at the mission plan, only to then not understand the "why" of this particular switch that I'm throwing, to then open a pdf with a "astronaut training booklet" which explains the overview of the thing I'm using, to then open another pdf with the detail technical documentation of it, to then a schematic of the equipment should I at any point (but prob not) ever try building one myself.

[jjice]

The care that must go into writing and testing software that goes out to a machine like this is incredible. I write software that, if and when it fails, it fails hard and it just comes back with no added cost to me while I go ahead and look at what went wrong and release a fix within the hour.

Not having that failure feedback loop is daunting. I really respect that kind of work.

[Aardwolf]

Also the fact that this CPU is still running at all, after such long time in such hostile environment (radiation, temperatures)!

[shiroiuma]

These spacecraft don't have CPUs, at least not the way we think of them, in the sense of a single microprocessor IC. Their "CPUs" are built from discrete logic gates on CMOS and TTL ICs, the way the earliest digital arcade games were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Computers_and_...

[varjag]

The concept of CPU predates micro-processors. They were cabinet sized originally.

[jcaldas]

As Oscar Wilde wrote, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars".

[wutwutwat]

Shared this with my son who really enjoyed reading that others share his optimism about our species. Very well said, thank you. You've impacted the outlook of a young man trying to figure out his place in the universe, who often times struggles with noticing the rare opportunity it is to be gold dust peppering a radio telescope.

[Simplicitas]

"antidote to the darker side of our species." .. LOVE THIS!

[johnnyAghands]

This for summing up what I couldn't find the words for!