Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!
A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only occur every 175 years [2] .
The thruster fix is the part that gets me. They sent a command that would either revive thrusters dead since 2004 or cause a catastrophic explosion, then waited 46 hours for the round trip with zero ability to intervene. That's a production deployment with no rollback, no monitoring dashboard, and a 23-hour latency on your logs. They nailed it.
I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.
A well defined doc evolves over time. it gets sharper with real-world scenarios, incidents, and experiments. Before Voyager 1, we didn’t have that kind of experience. You can’t predict everything upfront.
There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent.
According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing.
Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
There is more information in a typical, single page of comments here than there is on the average webpage. And I'd say a far higher signal to noise ratio (though depending on the topic discussed some will disagree).
Nice. Do you just use your 5 as a stationary iPod, or do you dual-carry with a modern device as well? Curious on if you also use it to wi-fi the web on your local LAN periodically too, of it that was just a periodic test to check if HN worked.
It takes a lot to deliver value at velocity with a team of engineers that couldn't give a damn about the product and just want to get a paycheck, move up the ladder, etc.
LinkedIn is not a fun problem.
The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.
It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.
It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there.
Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
Project Hail Mary. It's a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir (author of The Martian) that was adapted into a movie that released in theaters a couple weeks ago. It's fantastic and you should totally read/watch it.
Nice. I’ve done some of my best learning by trying to do things with very artificially low resource constraints. The struggle I have at times is to properly calibrate my brain to the right resource scope. Ie. “No, stop optimizing these enums as integers instead of strings… this isn’t the game boy emulator this is a web browser. It’s fine.”
I’ve been looking at emulation for the first time in a long time, and it also blows my mind that entire big detailed games that we played for many hours take 100-400kb total (NES) or 2-4mb (Genesis).
Welcome to the world of embedded systems. They often do not have more resources that that. Even as completely new development (of pool control system or electricity meter).
What really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for the moon landings for that matter.
I knew about the memory, but an 8-track tape ? That is a surprise. But when you think of it, what else could you use for this in 1977.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
A tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been suitable to the task. Here's a photo:
An old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.
> For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, an object built by a living species had left the protective bubble of its home star system...
I'm just going to repost stuff from my blog about the Voyager space probes. I've posted this here before -
The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.
The contents:
- Greetings in 55 human languages.
- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing
The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.
Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.
And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.
It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "
That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.
Oh c’mon! Do you really believe we actually sent space probes ~15.0 billion miles from earth?
Next you’ll tell me that the message from humanity was read by someone later linked to Nazi-era activities (though not a confirmed war criminal in the legal sense).
Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!
They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent.
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only occur every 175 years [2] .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...
>despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up.
Could you elaborate on this?
Voyager 1 and 2 are 25 and 21 billion kilometres away, respectively.
Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.
I assume OP means that a probe launched today would take decades to exit the solar system.
The thruster fix is the part that gets me. They sent a command that would either revive thrusters dead since 2004 or cause a catastrophic explosion, then waited 46 hours for the round trip with zero ability to intervene. That's a production deployment with no rollback, no monitoring dashboard, and a 23-hour latency on your logs. They nailed it.
I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.
> ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing"
like in "fast pacing environments" with "flat hierarchies" and "agile mindset"? :-D
I’d argue that you must not be working on interesting problems if you think that “engineering is not that hard”
I think their point is that the challenge becomes more enjoyable than tedious.
A well defined doc evolves over time. it gets sharper with real-world scenarios, incidents, and experiments. Before Voyager 1, we didn’t have that kind of experience. You can’t predict everything upfront.
> Theory only takes you so far
Would sending voyager have been a real definite deadline?
Visiting this many planets was only possible due to a very rare alignment. It's a once a century event. That's why we sent two probes, not just one
Absolutely. You could wait decades or centuries for a useful planetary alignment.
There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
> Video unavailable > The uploader has not made this video available in your country
I'd love to watch this but unfortunately. My country being AU.
https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/trailer is the official site.
This YouTube video is just a trailer for the documentary, it does look amazing. It looks like the entire documentary is available on some free streaming sites, here's one: https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-twilig...
If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as country.
Why do some uploaders make it unavailable in certain countries?
Such a wonderful meditation on career and meaning and fellowship and purpose. I loved it.
Very depressing to see this next to the "LinkedIn uses 2.4GB of RAM" post.
Any website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be considered bloated.
There's almost certainly less than 69KB of useful human-readable information on any given page.
I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent.
According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing.
Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
There is more information in a typical, single page of comments here than there is on the average webpage. And I'd say a far higher signal to noise ratio (though depending on the topic discussed some will disagree).
I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent.
I use an iPhone 5 as an iPod. HN is one of the few web sites that still works with iOS 10.
Nice. Do you just use your 5 as a stationary iPod, or do you dual-carry with a modern device as well? Curious on if you also use it to wi-fi the web on your local LAN periodically too, of it that was just a periodic test to check if HN worked.
640K is all anybody actually needs
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120477
Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed.
350 is already massive. Lots of software and games were developed by teams smaller than 20.
E.g. Word 1.0 was developed with 13 people:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18764790
Any development team larger than Apollo programming team of 350 is overstaffed
We put a man on the moon mostly with pencils and slide rules.
Today we have massive data centers full of "AI" supercomputers, and we get… TikTok?
Takes a lot of resources to track your users rather than just cruising through space
Voyager only needs to track itself. Plus, no ads.
It takes a lot to deliver value at velocity with a team of engineers that couldn't give a damn about the product and just want to get a paycheck, move up the ladder, etc.
LinkedIn is not a fun problem.
The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.
It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.
It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there.
Hence the bloat.
""just""
Here's a photo of the tape recorder:
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html
Duh its space you have to use Turbo pascal
Duh, turbo doesn't work in space. Surely you meant High Speed Pascal!
https://www.fihl.net/HSPascal/
I feel like that's also what's running the backend of Spirit Airlines, but somehow it feels more impressive in the context of Voyager 1.
Wow! Reading this after watching PHM I almost cried...again.
Now, this is what impressed me the most: ""... and wrote software flexible enough to be updated from Earth decades after launch.."
OTA patches where invented in the 70's :)
What's PHM
Project Hail Mary. It's a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir (author of The Martian) that was adapted into a movie that released in theaters a couple weeks ago. It's fantastic and you should totally read/watch it.
Good they launched Voyager 1 before invention of Docker, Electron and NPM projects with thousands of padLefts.
There’s a lot of LLM text in that article. It’s very offputting.
Wish javascript devs would read this. If the web is slow, its because of them
Amaze. Amaze. Thank you for sharing.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260329164132/https://techfixat...
Nice. I’ve done some of my best learning by trying to do things with very artificially low resource constraints. The struggle I have at times is to properly calibrate my brain to the right resource scope. Ie. “No, stop optimizing these enums as integers instead of strings… this isn’t the game boy emulator this is a web browser. It’s fine.”
I’ve been looking at emulation for the first time in a long time, and it also blows my mind that entire big detailed games that we played for many hours take 100-400kb total (NES) or 2-4mb (Genesis).
My first computer had 32KB. Reading the headline there's still a part of my brain that went "69KB? Luxury!".
> My first computer had 32KB.
1KB for me[0]. Then another 1KB[1] expanded to 16KB via my father's electronic wizardry. Then an official 16KB[2] and ever upwards from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
Still amazed how much fun it is to play a 36KB Stargate Defender!
Welcome to the world of embedded systems. They often do not have more resources that that. Even as completely new development (of pool control system or electricity meter).
What really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for the moon landings for that matter.
Very cool, first time reading about the specifics of voyager 1, this is super impressive!
It's very distracting to have every sentence in this article be its own paragraph.
It's LLM slop unfortunately, bears the hallmarks at least :(
I knew about the memory, but an 8-track tape ? That is a surprise. But when you think of it, what else could you use for this in 1977.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
A tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been suitable to the task. Here's a photo:
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
An old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years
Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in 1985 into my TRS-80.
That's 41 years ago.
I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick tape.
> For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, an object built by a living species had left the protective bubble of its home star system...
Seriously?
This is one mighty tape recorder, hats off:
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magne...
I'm just going to repost stuff from my blog about the Voyager space probes. I've posted this here before -
The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.
Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.
Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.
The contents:
- Greetings in 55 human languages.
- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing
The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.
Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.
And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.
It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "
That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.
Full piece - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
but can it play Doom?
Decommission. It's not AI ready.
If we wait long enough someone out there will upgrade it and send it back to us.
For those unaware (spoiler follows) this is the reveal in the plot of 'Star Trek - The Motion Picture'.
I implore you to read 17776
so unbelievable that makes you wonder if its all fake.
Oh c’mon! Do you really believe we actually sent space probes ~15.0 billion miles from earth?
Next you’ll tell me that the message from humanity was read by someone later linked to Nazi-era activities (though not a confirmed war criminal in the legal sense).
And what did we get from this space innovation?
Not the cheap prosumer high density backup tape drives that we should be able to buy in the stores now.