Why does the picture at the top of the article look more like Cassini–Huygens than Voyager?
NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
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Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#72It's mind boggling that they didn't digitize every last scrap of paper around the project years ago, for starters.
Maybe not years ago, but scanning documents with the phone in your pocket has become incredibly efficient. That combined with AI transcription and indexing for search makes such a project faster and cheaper in 2026 than at almost any other time in the past.
I scanned an entire book in 2016. It was way faster than scanning with the phone in my pocket. It’s just not ergonomic to use a general purpose device (a phone) instead of a specialized device (dedicated scanner).
Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that because juniors want to leave their name on something? I ask honestly since I shared a lot of the same sentiment as you, and never quite got an understanding as to why working on the cool new thing was "more fun" even if a lot of the projects under-the-hood were recycled.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... > We’re programmers. > Programmers are, in their hearts, architects, and the first thing they want to do when they get to a site is to bulldoze the place flat and build something grand. > We’re not excited by incremental renovation: tinkering, improving, planting flower beds.
He's very wrong.
Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#74Many of the issues could potentially be solved by modern LLMs? Reading, analyzing and assembling documentation could be probably done by LLMs. And by including old code and snippets into the training set, the LLM could be fairly proficient in writing this code probably too? Maybe someone knows more about the use/not-use of LLMs in this context?
I don't think you want LLMs touching projects that cost over $800.000.000, even to assemble "documentation" (since the LLM can't really document in as much it's translating what it's reading, because documentation includes much more information than what's stored in the code itself). It's a cool idea, though, I'd like to see this done as an experiment :)
My thought on this is that LLMs should be allowed to touch high stakes projects, but they shouldn't be left completely unsupervised.
Here me out.
Would you let AI manage your investments/retirement savings/etc. completely autonomously and unsupervised? Or would that make you a little nervous?
What if you had to undergo a X-Ray or a MRI. Would you ONLY want AI reading the images? Would you ONLY want a human radiologist reading the images? This is an interesting one because I would want both. In fact, I would find it questionable if AI wasn't given the opportunity to look at the images.
Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#75It's mind boggling that they didn't digitize every last scrap of paper around the project years ago, for starters.
Keeping a filing cabinet in the basement is awfully cheap...
Per the article, “much of the original documentation has been lost or fragmented. Voyager paperwork from the 1970s and 1980s was largely paper, and each time the project moved offices, more of it disappeared”.
Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#76Regarding "that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore", I claim this is nonsense, and definitely not an obstacle. I've audited codebases in languages that I haven't programmed in. It is a matter of grasping a few basic concepts, like branch execution, branch destination, where data is stored, how it is communicated. Don Lancaster told us how to do this: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/enhance_vI.pdf .
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Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#77[deleted]
Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe not years ago, but scanning documents with the phone in your pocket has become incredibly efficient. That combined with AI transcription and indexing for search makes such a project faster and cheaper in 2026 than at almost any other time in the past.
I scanned an entire book in 2016. It was way faster than scanning with the phone in my pocket. It’s just not ergonomic to use a general purpose device (a phone) instead of a specialized device (dedicated scanner).
Agreed. I scanned a short book with my phone, and a dedicated scanner would have been nice to have.
But with page flattening and separation and automated capture, it went much faster than I would have thought. If I were going to do a lot more, I'd want something like a scan tent [1]. It's not as ergonomic as a dedicated solution, but in 2026 a phone and some light can get you a lot of the way there, pretty fast.
Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? It's an isolated legacy-project with no future. Mostly everything you learn for it will be only useful for this specific project, so all time to invest there is time to can't invest into something useful. Sure, there are probably some parts to learn from this too, but It's less than what your co…
You don't need to push the needle as a junior though. It's a "completed project" where one can glean many insights. And the matter of transferrable skills is simply a matter of being able to say how what you learned applies in a different context. A useful skill in-and-of-itself
> You don't need to push the needle as a junior though.
Doesn't matter. Many young people have strong motivations to shine and push, especially when they are in high profile-jobs. Legacy-projects are simply not alluring enough for this.
Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? It's an isolated legacy-project with no future. Mostly everything you learn for it will be only useful for this specific project, so all time to invest there is time to can't invest into something useful. Sure, there are probably some parts to learn from this too, but It's less than what your co…
> Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there. This is just so blatantly ignorant. As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.
> As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.
We are talking about the maintenance, not the research. Nobody has doubts about the scientific value of the collected data.