[HN Gopher] NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Vo...
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NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission
Nears Its End
Author : rntn
Score : 79 points
Date : 2025-04-05 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| Sad to see EOL coming up, but too bad NASA's budget has been cut
| so back over the years.
|
| We just had a smaller planetary alignment a few months ago. Would
| have been nice if NASA had the budget to send out a more robust
| craft a few years ago. But I guess science no longer means
| anything to the US. Especially now.
|
| Maybe China will take up the mantle, I heard they are about to
| send out a rather long term interesting craft, but I forgot the
| details.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| A visual alignment like the one you mention wouldn't have been
| useful for spacecraft to get to the planets more easily.
|
| An alignment in the scale of the one that enabled the Voyager
| flybys of the outer planets won't happen until sometime in the
| 23rd century.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > An alignment in the scale of the one that enabled the
| Voyager flybys of the outer planets won't happen until
| sometime in the 23rd century.
|
| Only if you're particularly concerned with using a _single_
| probe to visit all of them. Jupiter provides the main boost
| and launch windows from jupiter to anywhere come by every
| decade.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Parent did mention a single craft. Of course NASA can't
| even afford that these days so it's all moot anyway.
| rayiner wrote:
| NASA's budget is larger today adjusted for inflation than
| during the Voyager program.
| https://images.app.goo.gl/qai42hiZ8RMtfViw6
| saagarjha wrote:
| People usually measure this as percentage of GDP, not
| absolute dollars.
| rayiner wrote:
| No they don't. Why would a budget scale with GDP?
| saagarjha wrote:
| A couple of reasons. One is that NASA is an arm of the
| United State's advanced research, and if you want to get
| compounding returns there the goal is that you allocate a
| proportion of your spending there rather than a fixed
| value, because every year some of that research will
| drive gains to your GDP. Another is that the services
| that NASA provides gradually expands as it provides more
| things to society: I expect that alongside space
| exploration there is an increasing budget allocated to
| dealing with civilian spaceflight. So if you keep the
| budget constant then you are necessarily prioritizing
| some things over others, which means a net decrease to
| specific programs.
|
| Of course, none of this means it should be pegged at a
| specific fraction of the GDP, it's just a helpful metric
| to compare against when we look at overall spending. I
| expect its budget to fluctuate naturally as our needs
| from it change, and there are certainly programs that
| have fixed budgets (or even need less money as time goes
| on) that we should still be looking at. But in general
| the spending for things like NASA _should_ gradually
| increase because of its goals.
| rayiner wrote:
| I agree with that. But that's different than saying
| "NASA's budget has been cut so back over the years." The
| military budget has been shrinking as a share of GDP
| since the 1980s as well. It would be odd to say the
| military budget had been cut back though.
| rlpb wrote:
| Arguably it makes more sense for military budget to
| reference GDP since military capability is relative to
| that of one's adversaries. If their capability has
| increased, then so must ours to achieve a net zero
| difference. And their capability is proportional to their
| spending ability with everything else kept equal.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| You're too smart to make that comparison. 1980s we were
| in the middle of a VERY strong cold was with the USSR.
| Every American agrees that military focused has decreased
| since then, while scientific focus/interest/value has
| increased.
| kelnos wrote:
| Why would I measure it that way? What matters is the
| capacity of NASA's ability to do things, based on its
| funding.
|
| You can argue that an outfit like NASA should get more or
| less funding, but it should be based on what you want them
| to be able to do, not some arbitrary measure like a
| percentage of GDP.
| davidwritesbugs wrote:
| It's stunning to think how well these missions have done and what
| we've learnt. I'd love to see new missions aimed at much greater
| longevity with more modern instruments. I wonder how long one
| could make the mission? 100 years? 200? Would new generators
| reduce the power loss to less than 4W/year, or would it just need
| more/much bigger ones?
| jahlove wrote:
| Obligatory trailer for the "It's Quieter in the Twilight"
| documentary, about the team of engineers riding out the end of
| the Voyager program:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJT8AW0wYw
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Seconded. I found it both technically interesting and also
| moving.
| gcp123 wrote:
| I've been following Voyager since the late 70s when my dad (who
| worked at Ames) would bring home printouts of the Jupiter images.
| This interview captures something profound about these missions
| that non-space folks often miss.
|
| The most striking part isn't the technical achievement of keeping
| 1970s hardware alive for half a century. It's the human
| infrastructure behind it - the institutional knowledge passed
| through generations of engineers like some ancient priesthood
| maintaining a temple.
|
| Think about it: We're teaching 2020s engineers to understand
| machine code written before MS-DOS existed, working with 50 year
| old documentation on yellowing paper, and bringing retirees back
| to decipher systems they built when Nixon was president.
|
| Our space exploration legacy is being maintained by the
| engineering equivalent of oral history. This is why we need
| consistent funding for these long-term missions - the value isn't
| just in the data, but in maintaining the unbroken chain of
| knowledge transfer that makes missions like this possible.
|
| The sticky notes on diagrams trying to revive a silent probe 15
| billion miles away just broke me. This is humanity at its finest.
| gzer0 wrote:
| Every time this topic comes up on HN, I always like to remind
| readers about the following:
|
| One of my favorite facts ever is that Voyager 1 contains
| something called the Voyager Golden Record [1]. It has the
| following quote written:
|
| _This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our
| sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our
| feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live
| into yours._
|
| I get chills every time I think about this.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| The Golden Records [1] seem like astonishing, singular
| undertakings to me. Like the Svalbard seed bank, or the LHC, or
| the Prado. Their existence inspires me because they remind me
| of what we're capable of.
|
| The book Murmours of Earth by Carl Sagan, Frank Drake, and Ann
| Druyan is an interesting commentary on the ideas and choices
| behind the production of the Golden Records. Published in 1978,
| but there are copies available from the usual aources.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
| qingcharles wrote:
| I always imagine it being the only thing left of humanity one
| day to show we even existed.
|
| Like, some aliens will play it and feel an experience like the
| TNG episode "The Inner Light."
| baxtr wrote:
| I thought it was interesting to share the full quote. Imagine
| what we might be writing today: we will come and take your
| planet!
|
| _> An official statement by President Jimmy Carter was
| included as images (positions 117, 118). It reads, in part:
|
| This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of
| America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among
| the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human
| beings are still divided into nation states, but these states
| are rapidly becoming a global civilization. We cast this
| message into the cosmos...
|
| It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when
| our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the
| Earth may be vastly changed. Of the 200 billion stars in the
| Milky Way galaxy, some - perhaps many - may have inhabited
| planets and space faring civilizations.
|
| If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand
| these recorded contents, here is our message: This is a present
| from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science,
| our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are
| attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We
| hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a
| community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our
| hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and
| awesome universe._
| piokoch wrote:
| Voyagers are the greatest technical achievement of human kind.
| Keeping in the space a piece of hardware run by a computer with
| power of today's car keys, in the hostile environment, outside
| freaking solar system is something that is the most amazing thing
| we have witnessed so far.
|
| Kudos to all the people who made it happen and kept going this
| project, we owe them, as a humanity, really a lot.
|
| Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last
| longer the the Earth itself, as the witnesses of our
| civilization.
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(page generated 2025-04-05 23:01 UTC)