>Still, the Voyager probes have far exceeded expectations. Looking at engineers' testimonials from when it was built, Dodd said the original designers were told

>Still, the Voyager probes have far exceeded expectations. Looking at engineers' testimonials from when it was built, Dodd said the original designers were told not to worry about reaching interstellar space and focus on making sure the Voyagers could observe Jupiter and Saturn. “Basically they kind of ignored those directions, nodded their heads and did what they wanted to make it capable of getting to interstellar space,” she said. IIRC when they were building spacecraft back then, in the labs they used a lot of sophisticated electronic test instruments from companies like HP (when they were more of a military contractor than a consumer company). Lots of times the design philosophy for HP gear was knowing that nothing is perfect or will last forever, try to make it so anyway. Something Hewlett & Packard had definitely been working on for decades by then. When NASA came along, they were just plain expected to have an even higher standard for the spacecraft than the ground-based systems.