Voyager 1 breaks its silence with NASA via radio transmitter not used since 1981

What's wrong with the Boeing case on needing to be rebooted.

It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?

I haven’t yet had a chance to work on aerospace (or beyond) equipment though I do work on medical grade things and some of the parts are aerospace certified, though they haven’t been put through the ringer. In particular, I work with high voltage/amperage, high liquid pressure and high temperature systems. Some of it has been running for close to 25-30 years with very few issues. Only recently have I had to open a power supply that degraded since it was first put into service (over 20 years ago). I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. I want the person, if anyone, who comes after to see the work that’s of higher standard than what came out of the factory. No machine can continue working forever, but one can get much closer to having fewer failure points. As an aside, to get to here however was a struggle of obtaining all sorts of things I shouldn’t have access to because the manufacturer started locking access down heavily. Story for another time.

I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project.

So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong.

I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.

Yes. As a left-libertarian, I criticize corporations and their profit motive all the time. I see the concentration of power being married to the inherent incentives of increasing share value for the shareholder class. The only way I see we can reform the system — and fix many of the problems — is to gradually replace shares with utility tokens, ie the accounting system inside an ecosystem that producers and consumers of a marketplace use, and gradully buy out the parasitic class of “investors” who just want to extract rents and enshittify everything. It is a bit like the efforts Europe undertook at peacefully buying out slaves from masters or serfs from feudal lords. Just get out gradually from an economic system that encouraged exploitation.

We have just been inculcated with this exploitation as a “natural” part of our capitalist system for so long, since childhood for most of us, that many have a knee-jerk reaction to shut down this line of criticism and not hear the simple solution. Many on HN have built a startup when they’re young, been part of the VC industry, akin to a music prodigy or young actor or model being “discovered” by “talent scout”, and sold a dream which only a few achieve. For every 1 person who makes it big, 1000 who do the same thing fail. But they keep licking the boots of the system hoping they’ll be among the lucky ones, so they better say nice things. If they see words like “utility tokens” they immediately think “grift”, when in fact the system they’re supporting has grift and exploitation built in. Having utility token holders buy out shareholders also may be an element in furthering SDG goals and “stakeholder capitalism”, and saving the planet. But hey, as soon as the words are uttered which may trigger pushback, the system starts to protect itself, in the form of downvotes or strawman attacks etc.

Yeah, planned obsolescence is one feature of corporate control and profit system. As is surveillance capitalism, or pollution, or pushing people to work long hours, or have a gig economy, neglect their kids, or having people in echo chambers be angry at each other online because anger and misunderstanding leads to more “engagement” etc. All the ways that represent gradual “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined, is not an accident. These are all negative externalities, which are all traced back to one main factor: the profit motive of shareholders as a core feature in the system, forever. The rents aren’t going to extract themselves.

While I agree that "corporate America" is problematic, the lessons from Voyager are not really applicable. For starters, it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years. Very few corporations last that long. Then there is the element of predictability. The solar system pretty much works like clockwork. You can predict simple things, like the orbits of major bodies, centuries in advance with a great degree of accuracy.

Compare that to the tech industry. IBM itself can trace it's origins back to a data processing company about 140 years ago. They probably had the most natural evolution into a modern tech company because of those origins. Yet noone at the original mechanical tabulator company could have predicted what IBM would be producing 70 years later, nevermind a century later. Nintendo is roughly the same ago and is more-or-less doing the same sort of thing (gaming) but has gone from low-tech to high-tech so their path was not predictable. Yet those are abnormalities. Almost anything that old is an institution of some form (e.g. government or education). Perhaps the closest thing we had to predictable was Moore's Law, but that wasn't a pure law in the physics sense. It was reliable enough to build an industry upon for many decades, but it could have failed much earlier than it did due to hurdles in technological developments.

The other thing about Voyager is that its intrinsic value grew with time. While we could develop a mission that could go as far as it did faster, and have better instruments to conduct research, it would take decades to build the probe and get there. It also makes sense to support it to get what little data it can return to us because it would help us develop better missions when we do decide to go that route.

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...]

You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone?

There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver!

But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.

Principal agent problem. Look at the final outcomes. Business exists to make money even if it means the most malicious ways (ex planned obsolescence), science project are not there to make money.

I mean, the Voyager probes are completely proprietary. They’re completely custom, built for a unary purpose.

Building long lasting hardware makes a lot of sense when you expect to use that technology for a long time. I’m sure there was a time when people thought we’d be using steam power forever.

It makes less sense if the rate of technological innovations makes hardware or software obsolete every 5-10 years.

I'm not saying your wrong but it's also possible that technology whether created by public agencies or private companies is simply more complicated now and because of that .. more likely to fail over time.

It also helps to have $4.5B (in 2024 dollars) to spend on a project.

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacec...

I'm 55 and still using my Onkyo receiver and Polk speakers from college.

Everything is designed to last between a few years and a decade, with the expectation that there's no point engineering for longer than that because something better will replace it by then. This feels bad but it's generally correct. Practically every aspect of technology is improving so fast there's little point trying to engineer things that last, because a stronger, cheaper, lighter, thinner thing will be available long before the thing has expired.

Agile is a response to this, not the cause.

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence

There is no such thing as "planned obsolescence". The trade-off is price vs quality. You can buy or source a hammer that will last you a lifetime, but will cost 10x the standard rate of hammer ... most people opt for the $20 option vs the $200 option, knowing full well, the $20 option may not last as long.

>Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups.

Couple things here:

1) None of those are examples of 'planned obsolescence'.

2) You really do not want to have every software application built the same way you build software for NASA. It would make software development incredibly expensive and slow.

3) I think everyone agrees that Boeing has major quality problems when compared with Airbus. But again, not an example of 'planned obsolescence', and it is not necessary for Boeing to build software like NASA builds software for the space shuttle, in order to produce quality airplanes (with quality software).

>if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell,

Huh? The software business is fully private. Most companies are not running on Novell because other businesses 'had their way' and competed.

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...]

We have that sort of- in open source by now. Basically the base implementation is free. But for more advanced extras you pay extra. Then the company providing the extras collapses and the extra becomes open source in one way or another.

Expanding a tiny bit on your point, from where I am sitting, it all be summed up with greedy, plain and simple...and extends further to Capitalism as a whole, not just corporate America. I work for a US-based manufacturing company that has customers around the world as the guy who fixes the things the engineers build when they inevitably break. I have encountered so many design flaws that could have been done far, far better but we're not, largely due to cost, that I have come to just expect it. This is admittedly sad.

Some other commenter mentioned we can have all these great long-lasting things if we "are willing to pay." We, the consumer my might be, but the manufacturer and distributer who makes the the product not only want to sell you something once, but want to sell it to you repeatedly while maximizing their profit margins. This would not be so bad if a good chunk of those yearly record profits reached the folks who were on the work floor actually making the product (thus allowing them to buy more expensive things) but instead, the money gets sucked up and stays up, while costs get passed on to the consumer who likely is not making enough to afford the longer-lasting version. Which, I guess is the point of Capitalism, in a nutshell.

> Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups.

I know of several ATMs that still run OS/2 2.1 or OS/2 Warp. They're a slow dying breed that is being replaced by Unix (Linux or similar), but they still exist. Chances are, if you're in Europe, and the ATM you're using is one of the "slow screen refresh rate" ones, it's still running OS/2.

I really think competition is good in one sense.

But of you think logically from first principles, it makes no sense to have both an a320 and 737.

All this competition and “corporate greed” where we literally have two airplanes that are functionally identical rebuilt from the ground up is an huge, massive waste of human capital and enabled by the government through monopoly of copyright and patents.

While I think creators should get paid, I wonder if there is a better way to manage copyright that what we do.

I think the government granting this extreme of a monopoly on copyright is one of the weirdest things we tolerate.

There has to be a way where we can statutorily authorize copying at x% fee or something.

That way we don’t build two copies of the same thing!

> if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running?

No, I doubt it. The businesses that make all the hardware and software that powers the internet are perfectly fine with it being an open protocol.

Cool! I do the same thing with books like Asimov’s Earth and Space (science) or Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (fictional history). What other books can you recommend?

NASA loves to downplay expectations in case something goes wrong, but people really underappreciate just how overengineered these things are, which makes sense when a bad mission can be political suicide for their future funding.

One feels a terrible disappointment Sagan didn't live to see the future mission projects he talks about in the book get finished and most of them succeeded IIRC. By happenstance the 2024 Solar System BBC series mostly uses animation but has some real photos and videos to document a lot of happened since the book was published.

Yeah it's really amazing that these come from a time where normal people had never even heard of bits and bytes. And now they're the furthest man made objects and their data link still works.

I remember learning about Hubble telescope losing its gyroscopes in one axis so it couldn’t balance and was effectively dead until someone clever figured out you could use the pressure from the sun to act as a third axis of motion to keep the craft stable. Sometimes it’s not just the stuff onboard but the ingenuity of the engineers that saves the day

Working in the government space sector, generally speaking, you're given a mission lifetime which is seen as a minimum. your payload/spacecraft/instrument needs to last at least this long. some things end up being limited by the physics of the system (See the RTG on the Voyager probes for a common example, or CEMs on plasma spectroscopy instruments for a more obscure example). However, in pretty much all cases where the physics doesn't put a hard cap on the thing you're building, nobody wants the thing building to be the first thing, or critical point of failure of the whole system.

jval43's quote puts it pretty well. It's not just that you're designing something to last, you're designing it not to fail. It also tends to help when you have a bunch of really smart folks from a number of disciplines working on the same problem.

With that said, you need to walk a fine line as far as the level of redundancy and fallbacks you put in place versus the overall SWaP (Space Weight and Power) of the system. I can go somewhat deeper into SWaP issues if you would like.

And I remember the "crazies" saying the world will come to an end due to that alignment. That belief was reported in the main stream media.

When it did not happen, I think they moved on to 2012 :)

I’m trying to figure out why the alignment was so important.

Wouldn’t it be possible to get a gravity assist in any alignment - albeit just taking a little longer to ping-pong across the system?

It wasn't just a lucky break, it was the result of furious efforts by scientists to lobby years in advance to take advantage of the alignment, as well as engineers who repurposed two Mariner probes to save money, as well as canny NASA bureaucrats who sneakily downplayed the possibility of a full Grand Tour in order to reduce estimated costs (with the full intent to underpromise and overdeliver, which Voyager 2 successfully did by "coincidentally" being on course to visit Neptune and Uranus after completing its primary mission to Jupiter and Saturn (to this day, Voyager 2 remains the only visitor to Uranus and Neptune)).

The paper for it is readable - Fast Reconnaissance Missions to the Outer Solar System Derived from the Gravitational Field of Jupiter http://www.gravityassist.com/IAF3-2/Ref.%203-143.pdf (1966)

Also fun to play with is: https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/index.php (example query with multiple flybys of outer planets - https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php?NEAs=on&NE... )

I like this quote:

“We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” John Casani, Voyager project manager from 1975 to 1977, says in a NASA statement.

Using plutonium works great but there are two issues. 1) they don’t output that much power. Few hundred watts at most, and they decay at a fixed rate. 2) you need to get your hands on a decent amount of plutonium. Great for dirty bombs, hard to source.

> I'm curious about the rationale behind this choice when nuclear power seems like a far superior option. Can someone shed light on this decision?

India’s plutonium has already been spoken for.

A good reason is the lack of availability of the needed isotope (Pu238).

The Europa Clipper has a huge array of solar panels instead of an RTG due to the last of the available supply going into the New Horizons spacecraft.

Pu238 was a cast-off isotope from nuclear weapons development so it was more readily available during the cold war. We should be happy that it's scarce now.

Also solar panels have gotten a lot better than they were when Voyager was launched, but even today anything going out past Saturn is not going to be able to use solar energy.

Availability :) a RTG requires Plutonium 238, which needs to ne created almost on purpose in a nucleare reactor. Not all nations have this ability or they are running such expensive programs. Also in the USA they are reserved for programs where there is very little light available

I don't know the exact reasons why Vikram didn't get a fission reactor. But I can assume from similar missions:

1. Solar is pretty good as far as Mars and it gets worse as it travel further from the Sun. This is why most probes that travel past Mars need a nuclear reactor (Voyager, Pioneer, Cassini, etc). Going closer to the sun they get even better

2. Sending radioactive materials on rockets presents a risk and it is avoided if possible, lunar probes are usually cheaper and can still benefit from solar, so no need for nuclear. Imagine throwing plutonium in the atmosphere in the case of an accident

3. Nuclear reactors in probes are small and rely on decay radiation, they _usually_ have pretty small powet output, solar has a lot

4. And last but not least, price, solar is much cheaper than nuclear

Dead in 14 days? Was there a miscalculation that lead them to believe they could make one full night?

Sure!

First, the nuclear power source is a giant hunk of plutonium. It is expensive to get, dangerous to use, and due to concerns about further refinement, is restricted internationally.

Second, it is toxic inherently — the source is continuously radioactive at a hazardous level to humans, plutonium itself has acute and long-term toxic effects aside from the radioactivity, and if a launch fails, the rtg will disintegrate and poison hundreds of miles (see Kosmos 954, which disintegrated over Canada)

Third, it is HEAVY. They produce 40W per kilogram. Solar panels produce three times that much on Mars, and can be folded compact for launch.

Voyager used an RTG because its planned mission took it far beyond where sunlight can generate power, and it could do so because it had the budget of NASA and plutonium from the Department of Energy.

Solar panels are way cheaper, lighter, easier to procure, easier to launch, and tend not to cause international incidents.

RTGs need plutonium 238. I've read even US doesn't have a lot available. The Europa Clipper will be using solar panel for example. India could also use batteries and a standby mode during the 14 days without sunlight. But any extra weight would add to the launch cost. Maybe in future missions as they get confident with successful landing, they will have bigger lander that can survive the lunar night. Even the early Mars rovers from NASA were tiny and solar powered (ie Sojourner in 1997.)

India is a nuclear armed-nation with some long-standing border tensions with some of their also nuclear-armed neighbors.

The military probably have priority on the decisions about the allocations of their plutonium stocks.

Wouldn't it be difficult as one would need large antennas and excellent alignment?

Voyager to earth is "relatively" easy it "just" beams toward the sun. And earth can afford to get big antennas scanning.

No, their RTGs are almost exhausted anyway so soon they won't have enough power to run anything.

The voyager probes were built in an incredible hurry to take advantage of a once-in-a-few hundred years optimal gravitational boosting path. Something launched later would never have been able to keep up, plus the antenna would be so, so much worse. The ground reptilian networks have effective antenna lengrhs of miles.

No, we cannot.

We could make a Voyager 3, but I don't think there is any way to expect it to catch up with currently feasible technology. And it could only be launched at specific times.

It certainly could have more advanced sensors and batteries. I don't know if the battery improvement would really matter on a decades long mission.

As far as I understand their speed mostly comes from gravity assists from Jupiter, so you'd have to wait for suitable orbital alignments and the basic technology for "much faster speed" doesn't exist.

Yes, but mostly no, also no, and, frankly, why would we.

Yes: we could lift off a much heavier spacecraft, give it plenty of fuel, and many of its parts would be lighter than their 1970s equivalent, giving us lots of room for modern sensors

No: the "battery" in the old ones is nuclear and it's going to be difficult to beat that (but not impossible: a nuclear stirling engine, either powered by fission or by decay, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/technology/rps/stirling-convertor-sets-...)

Also no: the old Voyagers benefited from a lot of gravity assists from half the solar system, thanks to an alignment which won't happen again until 2151 (https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5075/when-is-the-n...), so unless you're not in a hurry, we won't have that.

Why would we: the _point_ of the Voyager crafts was to do close flybys and collect plenty of data from the outer planets, not to go as far away and as fast as possible. You want to be as slow as possible near them, so you have science time. You're rushing this part in order to get right away to the centuries of nothing which follow?

Strictly speaking, the voyager missions already are the faster space craft that caught up with another spacecraft - Pioneer 10 and 11.

Looks like we lost contact with 10 and 11 in 1995 and 2006 respectively. They both ran out of power and shut down.

The voyager missions used a rare planetary alignment to get boosts. And a radioisotope thermal engine that has gotten pushback in later spacecraft designs, although they have ceramic versions now meant to address most of the issues.

That said, New Horizons, which gave us those lovely shots of Pluto, was launched in 2006. But it is traveling faster than the Pioneers but slower than Voyagers, so it’ll be the third farthest away at some point.

My understanding is that

1. Our rocket / propulsion technology today may be cheaper (thx largely to SpaceX), but it doesn't really necessarily provide MUCH more delta V. Meanwhile

2. Voyager launches relied on a once-in-a-blue-moon (not quite once in two centuries) alignment of various planetary bodies to give a spectacular orbital slingshot boosts.

So my limited understanding is that we can't really overtake voyagers very easily. Whether our current technology coild be made more reliable in the long term is another good point of discussion :-)

Even if we could there isn't much point. There just isn't very much out where the Voyagers are, and there won't be for a long time. We're shutting down sensors on Voyager because there just isn't much to see. It's just vacuum.

If we had something capable of getting to Voyager in a year that might be worthwhile, because it would stand a chance of getting somewhere interesting in a few decades. But we are absolutely nowhere near that level.

Not in our lifetimes

> at much faster speed

As others have pointed out, the speeds for Voyager 1 were because of gravity assist of Jupiter and Saturn while Voyager 2 was a gravity assist of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Jupiter & Saturn line up relatively often enough so we could try to outdo Voyager 1 speeds a bit with a lighter air craft due to various advancements. But it's unclear we'd learn anything really new from having sensors that reached further out and our technology for propulsion really hasn't meaningfully advanced to outdo gravity assists from Jupiter + Saturn. There's some proposals to use nuclear explosions behind a probe to achieve speeds of ~10k km/s which would be substantially faster but there's numerous obstacles (cost + international treaties banning the use of nuclear in space).

> let’s say just couple of years ?

Not a couple of years. The Voyagers have been doing around 38 000 mph since the late 1970's. That is rougly 17 km/s. The proposed Interstellar Probe mission aims to do 20 km/s or slightly more. It will take it decades to overtake any of them (no actual overtaking will probably take place though, as its trajectory most likely will be different).

There was much less overall complexity (and capability). These engineers interacted directly with capacitors and circuits to accomplish their tasks. Integrated circuits enable a lot of modern society, but it also segregates engineering between fabrication time and everything afterwards.

They had lot less resources and knowledge to estimate the right amount of resilience for achieving the mission goals and erred on the side of cautions.

You can see something similar happening in bridges, weight per meter load has come down considerably since the 60s because material understanding is much more advanced and they meed less margin for the same safety factor.

Golden NASA budgets might have helped…

They weren't affected by DEI nonsense yet.

>Were engineers 50 years ago just much smarter than we are now?

Were the 2006 sony santa monica programmers smarter then us when they delivered God of War 2 for the PS2 on its tiny resources?

Usually the constraints force you to become inventive and smart. Put a hard limit of 128 mb per tab on web browsers and suddenly both the developers of the browsers and the web developers will become extremely smart.

The over abundance of resources has made the majority of software engineers lazy. If we once again live in scarcity times - suddenly people will start to ask why we need 8 abstraction layers to do something.

I would guess they were quite smart bunch, but no superhuman - just people tasked with extremely challenging task, trying to jury rig something on the edge of possibility. My guess is that they took their tasks more seriously and to heart.

NASA missions still routinely overperform. Curiosity's been operational on Mars for a good 12 years now.

Most of our car engines run at a small fraction of their capability, even when going at highway speeds. Most servers have a 15-25% utilization to handle failover situations. If you have a beefy as fuck set up with extra wide tolerance margins, things can last for a very long time. Car engines with a chamber that’s essentially containing explosions still end up running for decades with very little maintenance. Well, some longer than others. This is also true for consumer electronics/appliances. You still have things going just fine from almost a century ago. Yes, some things fail faster than others and the designers were aware of limitations and trade offs, but most components continue working. What would be wise in this case is to look at how the voyager was designed for reliability to understand why it hasn’t completely gone off the rails. Meaning, what are the common anpproaches and why do they fail, and why doesn’t the voyager fail. What does it do that’s different than the usual method. Lots to be learned there but I don’t think the people were wizards, they probably dealt with very brittle things and had tight specs and knew how to design certain parts to very close to perfect. The manufacturing of parts plays a huge role in reliability. If you know you can achieve better manufacturing output but it is a matter of cost, then that’s easy - government can pay whatever. But if you don’t know, then that’s a harder situation to be in and that’s guess work. But if you have a capacitor that’s normally 20% off rating that you’d buy in a store, and you know you can get it to be down to 1% off or even less from rating, then you go for that with everything you’ve got. And all parts are made with as wide of tolerance as you can get so that as they degrade, things can still work. Easier said than done, but there it is. Things will eventually break and not work. But for now, Voyager has bought time, quite literally.

Could be the start of space records :-)

We have to way to know it it's actually the fastest and farthest object: A 1957 nuclear test was conducted underground, but the scientists decided to cap the borehole with a sizable concrete and metal plug.

The nuclear explosion may or may not have caused said plug to reach space - the data from the cameras indicate it had at least 6 times the needed escape velocity, but it is difficult to estimate whether it would completely disintegrate or if enough of it would survive the atmosphere and whether it would "count"

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Plumbob.html (look for Pascal-B)

If there was a will NASA could just buy one from Guinness. That's how they make their money now.

I think there’ve been at least two recent episodes of trouble, including this one. I feel like I’ve seen more than two articles about it though.

It's invaluable as we don't have any other probe at that distance.

See Three Body Problem (the books)

AFAIK launch vehicle cost were never the problem for deep space probes. Launch windows still are - Voyager was extremely lucky in this regard. And then there is probe design and construction - SpaceX made launches cheaper, but that just shift most of the cost into the payload. And then there is no point in having such a fleet if you there isn't enough funding for scientists to process the results.

Isn't most of the cost due to designing and building the probes? One launch has been routine for NASA (and others) since long before SpaceX.

If there’s any chance that the Dark Forest theory is valid, I’d really rather we not!

This PDF (101 pages) should get you started: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19660011758/downloads/19...

>so dense I’ll need a therapist to find my way back to society afterwards

Well, at least you are self enlightened to recognize your flaw...