It's amazing these projects began over 50 years ago in 1972 when 8-track tapes still dominated cassettes for music delivery.
The vehicle records flight and sensor data to tape, and then periodically broadcasts that back to earth. As of 2022 the tape drive appears to be still working [1].
For software, I fear complexity would make it much harder to build something that works for 50+ years, the probability of some nasty long term overflow bug or slow memory leak would make that difficult.
Yes, although that is very rarely a design goal.
>For software, I fear complexity would make it much harder to build something that works for 50+ years, the probability of some nasty long term overflow bug or slow memory leak would make that difficult.
Not that hard to handle. You just need to setup an appropriate architecture. In Aeronautic software systems you often have forced resets, if the software is not reaching certain points of exrcution. You also do not have memory leaks, since you do not have dynamic memory.