I highly recommend watching "Its Quieter in the Twilight" (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxr)
a cool documentary about the engineers still running voyager (a lot of them have been on it for decades)
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”.
I mean, they were never meant to last this long. NASA has a shoestring budget. I understand not taking the time and resources to do that when it could stop working a week later.
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).
Regarding "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.
As the should. Voyagers are still active and this maintenance is needed in case issues occur. In a way due to the +24 hours oneway communication to correct software issues should they occur, this will help speed corrections up.
Now I wonder how the test it ? Is it on a software emulator on modern equipment or do they have a Voyager replica ?
What they have is surprisingly fragmentary. For the recent software issue, they had to be very conservative in what they changed because they aren't 100% sure about the details of the ISA on the actual spacecraft (due to amiguity between different revisions of the wiring of the CPU), and so they don't really have a simulator they can trust.
That would be an interesting project, I assume a lot of not so young engineers will want to play with it, as a hobby. Also if that project exists, I'm sure that someone will try to port DOOM.
> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination
Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager.
I would go further... This project gives a rare opportunity for a young engineer to learn to build truly mission critical, resilient software while requiring complete, top to bottom understanding of the software and hardware stack.
I am no longer a junior, but would have been upset to be tasked with refreshing the old historical obsolete laundry (no matter how sacred or distinguished), expecially when I already had experience delivering safety critical products packing much more modern technologies.
The opportunity they would be offering is not rare at all! The opportunity to research and design something truly new on the other way is very scarce.
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.
> 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.
What have you worked on that is as cool as a space probe that's cruising in interstellar space and still collecting valuable data?
There are a lot of things as cool as, done by people I know, such as the gyros on the Webb telescope, the APU in the F-35, or a small rack-mountable Cesium reference clock, but there aren't many opportunities like that.
That's the thing. You only have the cool factor, but that wears off very quickly when you are maintaining legacy code and tools and then your collegues are playing with the new hot and shiny toys.
I won't write about the projects I've been involved with for privacy, but to give you an idea some of my old team members were involved in ams-02 for example.
I agree, and I would think the same, but I also feel like many things I've been sold as "door openers" for interviews unfortunately tend to ultimately be things that no one cares about.
I think people tend to squander door openers with bad layouts or information density. Most CVs are essentially the same as each other, just a bullet point list of jira ticket titles.
Do I care if someone has won the world championship for ping-pong 3 years in a row? Not particularly. Does it make them stand out against a sea of slop? Only if I actually see that info when skimming! But if I do see it, I'm probably going to stop and re-read the whole thing, which is a tactical advantage.
So you're giving me an idea for my midlife career change CV. Lead with the cool and interesting fact above all else, then have the normal CV menu fare at the end.
Hmm this is also drumming up the hard question of: What have I actually done which is ACTUALLY an attention-grabber...
I would assume they have built some key problem-solving skills that can be valuable. Training in tooling is much easier than building the right mindset.
It's a tragedy some of our best minds are dedicated to that, and digital surveillance so their corporate masters can sell better targeted ads with a higher click-thru rate.
I really think it's overly generous to throw people who do not understand the importance of extending Voyager's scientific mission into the "our best minds" category. I guess I agree with the larger point.
> 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 competitors will learn on their fancy modern projects.
> You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools
Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there. It's just work to hold the line as long as possible. And I guess nobody want's to be the one killing it because of a poor attempt to innovate something.
Understanding assembly language (any architecture) give insights into how computers work that are still valuable and relevant today. Almost nobody still writes code in assembly, but understanding it at least conceptually is still worth something.
If I were hiring, I would almost always prefer a candidate who had some experience at machine/assembly programming to one that didn't, all else being roughly equal.
I've been a developer for 20 years, I do some reverse engineering stuff on the side using assembly.
There hasn't been a single time in 20 years that it was actually relevant for real work in any way.
Unless you are doing very specific work knowing assembly is about as useful as knowing COBOL (which is also useful for a very specific kind of work that most devs will never do)
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 should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge. I'll take anyone who's worked on a weird obscure system and figured it out from first principles over Front End React Dev #8482828 with Opinions on algebraic effects.
> You should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge.
I'm not sure what personality characteristic are supposed to be in this context. But if you mean skills, then you have a false assumption. NASA and the surrounding industry is not really the environment where they grow boring react devs. For every legacy project like voyager, they have a dozen frontier-projects and other weird obscure jobs where one can gain the same skills, but better, with more potential for further growing. And someone early in their career will naturally choose something with more potential for their future.
>"Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers"
Assembly? Understanding how things actually work? No Agile? No K8s? No Rust, No React? - death knell for someone's resume
>"and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager"
this is the best case with the result of being tied to another single project for years and unemployable anywhere else. in more realistic case - warm goodbye in few years and start your life from scratch with no credits for the thins done.
Because software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense, it was like insulting someone’s religion, “how dare you challenge the sacred methods that the silicone valley companies are using?!!”
Additionally, back in the day there was true ownership for the code you write, the code is owned by you not the company, and I know few old engineers that until now (they are retired) the companies still pay them for using their code they wrote while working there. That sense of ownership encourages you to tackle hard issues rather feeling like a machine spewing code for someone else’s business, I have seen some contracts too where the company will have ownership for anything you do while you are in the contract, including your personal projects on your own free time.
Or like many a company that prefers to paper old hands with cash to keep an old system running until it is really, really no longer feasible.
Banks and airlines are the most common example, many of them run on mainframe systems with code that's old enough for humans to go into retirement - and replacement projects usually tend to go into the billions of euros range with many of them failing catastrophically.
Even paying some greybeard 500k a year to deal with that stuff despite him being retired is far more profitable in the short term. That's the problem with letting beancounters run the show because eventually, there will literally be barely anyone left alive who is capable - and even less who know all the "implicit knowledge" behind edge cases.
Unfortunately in many places it is indeed a cult and serves to ossify management decisions. We ARE doing Agile, what do you mean? No this person is the scrum master and they tell us what Agile is and then we do it, see?
I have worked at 8 different software places and none of them implemented things in a way I would call "genuinely agile" and most of them were just bad waterfall with more meetings and telling the engineers they are accountable for the bad ideas that are now their job.
CI/CD? How about make that only "Devops" job and then make the exact same undemocratized system before with gatekeepers who spend a significant amount of time blocking your work because they are afraid of things changing.
My point is you would never even have a clue that there is dysfunction at all without these methodologies. These days you at least have some idea in your head how it should be vs how it is.
I think there's something critical being lost in younger people who have never been exposed to the bad old ways and only understand their current situation through memes. We need to get a grip here.
>"So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?"
Well project managers can have their dramas. Just do not involve developers. Or what is even better - get the fuck out and leave it to people who can do things without drama.
>"All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results."
Pile of BS. It exists to feed whole layer of self serving people who contribute very little and grow like a cancer.
In my career I was lucky. I am an independent software developer. Designed and developed many products for various clients (including some of my own ventures) and have managed without Agile, Scrum and the likes. My largest products - I had teams of up to 35 people under me and somehow we've survived.
On few occasions I had pleasure to be on some of those meetings as a visitor - felt nothing but disgust. Again luckily I was spared from direct participation
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.
Arguably, Anthropic and Boeing are NOT what you should use to determine whether your coding practices are reasonable. Software problems with Boeing have literally killed hundreds of people due to faulty code and Claude Code is know to be a pretty buggy CLI (although extremely useful, sure).
Though I agree with the expensive factor. Perhaps, what I actually believe is that LLMs shouldn't touch code that's as mission critical as what NASA works on, even though it might be great to develop user-facing frontend software and CRUD backend code for huge corporations and projects.
> i can certainly imagine that LLMs help with the process of understanding and editing old code.
Can you trust it with assembly language for a custom-built CPU with its own instruction set? Even if you digitized all of the documentation you have no idea what was lost since 1977 (or earlier), or what was never written down to begin with.
> Many of the issues could potentially be solved by modern LLMs?
Yesterday I asked an LLM what customizations niri made to the KDL language.
It said niri modified the language to add single line comments with //. However if you visit the official home page of KDL https://kdl.dev/, the very first example shows single line comments as being part of the official spec. There's also a whole page dedicated to comments in the spec that mention this.
The moral of the story is LLMs are honestly really really bad and I'm sincerely concerned at how they manipulate people into thinking what they produce is accurate or trustable. I didn't believe the AI because my spidey sense said that doesn't feel right, so I double checked the real source.
It's gotten to the point where I'm finding a huge majority of the time, it provides incorrect information on really basic things. Pure hallucinations. I'm at the stage now where even if you paid me, I wouldn't use it. There's a 0% chance I'd ever consider paying for it in its current state and it's upsetting because it is killing off the web in real-time. It's becoming harder and harder to find useful and accurate information.
Of all the possible projects, this is the one where it's both highly feasible for humans to learn and historically critical that we have a full understanding and control of its operation.
> The succession problem matters most in the next decade. After that, the question becomes academic. There will be no Voyagers left to maintain.
Well, the Voyagers will still be there, there will be just no way to contact them anymore once the power runs out or communication is lost (whichever happens first)...
https://youtu.be/RIP1p5gAoak?si=ftTEGYFJscXJPaJm
A budget is a budget and all I said was I understood digitizing being down prioritized as a project when you have to get other things done (like SLS).
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.
Now I wonder how the test it ? Is it on a software emulator on modern equipment or do they have a Voyager replica ?
Simulators for the spacecraft and replicas for some bits of hardware.
Maybe only a few COBOL codebases still active can beat that? Or not?
Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager.
The opportunity they would be offering is not rare at all! The opportunity to research and design something truly new on the other way is very scarce.
> 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.
There are a lot of things as cool as, done by people I know, such as the gyros on the Webb telescope, the APU in the F-35, or a small rack-mountable Cesium reference clock, but there aren't many opportunities like that.
I won't write about the projects I've been involved with for privacy, but to give you an idea some of my old team members were involved in ams-02 for example.
I wouldn't normally approve of CV driven development, but for this?!
Do I care if someone has won the world championship for ping-pong 3 years in a row? Not particularly. Does it make them stand out against a sea of slop? Only if I actually see that info when skimming! But if I do see it, I'm probably going to stop and re-read the whole thing, which is a tactical advantage.
Hmm this is also drumming up the hard question of: What have I actually done which is ACTUALLY an attention-grabber...
That's what the interview is to find out, isn't it?
> Would they even match the requirements?
I would assume if they got a job at NASA working on mission critical systems, they probably exceed the requirements of my startup
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 competitors will learn on their fancy modern projects.
> You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools
Voyager is in maintenance, there is no big innovation or big progress to be made there. It's just work to hold the line as long as possible. And I guess nobody want's to be the one killing it because of a poor attempt to innovate something.
If I were hiring, I would almost always prefer a candidate who had some experience at machine/assembly programming to one that didn't, all else being roughly equal.
There hasn't been a single time in 20 years that it was actually relevant for real work in any way.
Unless you are doing very specific work knowing assembly is about as useful as knowing COBOL (which is also useful for a very specific kind of work that most devs will never do)
This is just so blatantly ignorant. As if you believe there's some other space agency taking scientific measurements out past the heliopause.
I'm not sure what personality characteristic are supposed to be in this context. But if you mean skills, then you have a false assumption. NASA and the surrounding industry is not really the environment where they grow boring react devs. For every legacy project like voyager, they have a dozen frontier-projects and other weird obscure jobs where one can gain the same skills, but better, with more potential for further growing. And someone early in their career will naturally choose something with more potential for their future.
As a hiring manager, if I saw this on a resume interspersed with various web development work, I would be intrigued.
Assembly? Understanding how things actually work? No Agile? No K8s? No Rust, No React? - death knell for someone's resume
>"and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager"
this is the best case with the result of being tied to another single project for years and unemployable anywhere else. in more realistic case - warm goodbye in few years and start your life from scratch with no credits for the thins done.
Additionally, back in the day there was true ownership for the code you write, the code is owned by you not the company, and I know few old engineers that until now (they are retired) the companies still pay them for using their code they wrote while working there. That sense of ownership encourages you to tackle hard issues rather feeling like a machine spewing code for someone else’s business, I have seen some contracts too where the company will have ownership for anything you do while you are in the contract, including your personal projects on your own free time.
Banks and airlines are the most common example, many of them run on mainframe systems with code that's old enough for humans to go into retirement - and replacement projects usually tend to go into the billions of euros range with many of them failing catastrophically.
Even paying some greybeard 500k a year to deal with that stuff despite him being retired is far more profitable in the short term. That's the problem with letting beancounters run the show because eventually, there will literally be barely anyone left alive who is capable - and even less who know all the "implicit knowledge" behind edge cases.
So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?
All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results.
I have worked at 8 different software places and none of them implemented things in a way I would call "genuinely agile" and most of them were just bad waterfall with more meetings and telling the engineers they are accountable for the bad ideas that are now their job.
CI/CD? How about make that only "Devops" job and then make the exact same undemocratized system before with gatekeepers who spend a significant amount of time blocking your work because they are afraid of things changing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
I think there's something critical being lost in younger people who have never been exposed to the bad old ways and only understand their current situation through memes. We need to get a grip here.
Well project managers can have their dramas. Just do not involve developers. Or what is even better - get the fuck out and leave it to people who can do things without drama.
>"All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results."
Pile of BS. It exists to feed whole layer of self serving people who contribute very little and grow like a cancer.
In my career I was lucky. I am an independent software developer. Designed and developed many products for various clients (including some of my own ventures) and have managed without Agile, Scrum and the likes. My largest products - I had teams of up to 35 people under me and somehow we've survived.
On few occasions I had pleasure to be on some of those meetings as a visitor - felt nothing but disgust. Again luckily I was spared from direct participation
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?
It's a cool idea, though, I'd like to see this done as an experiment :)
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.
Though I agree with the expensive factor. Perhaps, what I actually believe is that LLMs shouldn't touch code that's as mission critical as what NASA works on, even though it might be great to develop user-facing frontend software and CRUD backend code for huge corporations and projects.
And of course you need to test and debug before you ship to production.
Can you trust it with assembly language for a custom-built CPU with its own instruction set? Even if you digitized all of the documentation you have no idea what was lost since 1977 (or earlier), or what was never written down to begin with.
Since the Bun AI LLM 'exeriment' conversion got merged I'm a lot less trusting of 'experiments' with LLMs. They seem to get shipped
Yesterday I asked an LLM what customizations niri made to the KDL language.
It said niri modified the language to add single line comments with //. However if you visit the official home page of KDL https://kdl.dev/, the very first example shows single line comments as being part of the official spec. There's also a whole page dedicated to comments in the spec that mention this.
The moral of the story is LLMs are honestly really really bad and I'm sincerely concerned at how they manipulate people into thinking what they produce is accurate or trustable. I didn't believe the AI because my spidey sense said that doesn't feel right, so I double checked the real source.
It's gotten to the point where I'm finding a huge majority of the time, it provides incorrect information on really basic things. Pure hallucinations. I'm at the stage now where even if you paid me, I wouldn't use it. There's a 0% chance I'd ever consider paying for it in its current state and it's upsetting because it is killing off the web in real-time. It's becoming harder and harder to find useful and accurate information.
Of all the possible projects, this is the one where it's both highly feasible for humans to learn and historically critical that we have a full understanding and control of its operation.
Well, the Voyagers will still be there, there will be just no way to contact them anymore once the power runs out or communication is lost (whichever happens first)...