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NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
- rbanffy 5mo ago> 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.
- glimshe 5mo agoI 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.
- bombcar 5mo agoEven all that to the side, it lets you say you worked on the Voyager project!
- lexicality 5mo agoIf I'm reviewing CVs and I see that you worked at NASA on the Voyager code, you're getting an interview just so I can ask about it. I wouldn't normally approve of CV driven development, but for this?!
- xingped 5mo agoI 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.
- lexicality 5mo agoI 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.
- butlike 5mo agoSo 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...
- rbanffy 5mo agoYou could work on the Voyager project.
- PurpleRamen 5mo agoBut would you give them a job? Would they even match the requirements?
- rbanffy 5mo agoI 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.
- M95D 5mo agoBut the required midset today is "move fast and break things"...
- lexicality 5mo ago> But would you give them a job? 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
- bigfatkitten 5mo agoThere are a whole lot of people in this thread who would rather tell their grandkids that they worked on web apps and sold ads.
- rbanffy 5mo agoIt'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.
- justin66 5mo agoI 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.
- rbanffy 5mo agoWell… some of the best minds are doing actual useful stuff. Sadly, most aren’t.
- anthonj 5mo agoI 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.
- rbanffy 5mo agoWhat 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.
- anthonj 5mo agoThat'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.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoYou would be able to go to your grave saying "I worked on the Voyager project." That will never not be interesting, or memorable.
- butlike 5mo agoIs 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.
- rbanffy 5mo agoQ: What was the hardest debugging problem you had? A: I had a very slow network connection to the computer, and it was 23 light-hours away from me.
- M95D 5mo agoIt also gives a rare opportunity to fuck things up and fail a mission that nobody else fucked up in ~50 years.
- tamimio 5mo agoBecause 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.
- philipallstar 5mo agoRose-tinted glasses, eh? They ain't what they used to be.
- ourmandave 5mo agoStill paid for the code you wrote while working there sounds like a consultant with a hell of a contract, not an employee.
- mschuster91 5mo agoOr 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.
- PurpleRamen 5mo ago> 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.
- quotemstr 5mo agoYou 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.
- aworks 5mo agoIt would also be an interesting job, even if off the beaten track. As a hiring manager, if I saw this on a resume interspersed with various web development work, I would be intrigued.
- PurpleRamen 5mo ago> 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.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
- FpUser 5mo ago>"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.
- RagnarD 5mo agoIt's mind boggling that they didn't digitize every last scrap of paper around the project years ago, for starters.
- birdsongs 5mo agoI 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.
- rvnx 5mo agoNASA has a significantly larger overall budget than SpaceX for info
- sumeno 5mo agoAnd far more responsibilities too. You can't just directly compare budgets
- birdsongs 5mo agoHow is that at all relevant to my comment? Spacex isn't part of this conversation. 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).
- egorfine 5mo agoI'm pretty sure volunteers will happily do this if NASA gave permission.
- londons_explore 5mo agoKeeping a filing cabinet in the basement is awfully cheap...
- no-name-here 5mo agoPer 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”.
- tech-no-logical 5mo agoI highly recommend watching "Its Quieter in the Twilight" (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxr 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)
- em-miyamoto 5mo agoContent not available. Any chance it wasn't like that 10 minutes ago?
- Markoff 5mo agohe cropped one character from address, the correct address is this https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxrg https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxrg
- SirFatty 5mo agoVideo isn't there... but I found it on YT. https://youtu.be/RIP1p5gAoak?si=ftTEGYFJscXJPaJm https://youtu.be/RIP1p5gAoak?si=ftTEGYFJscXJPaJm
- Markoff 5mo agoyou copypasted link missing "g" in the end this is correct link: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxrg https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxrg
- TacticalCoder 5mo agoSo it's 60 years old codebase still running. And in the two human-made objects the further away from earth. Maybe only a few COBOL codebases still active can beat that? Or not?
- roflmaostc 5mo agoMany of the issues could potentially be solved by modern LLMs? 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?
- doodlesdev 5mo agoI 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 :)
- philipwhiuk 5mo ago> It's a cool idea, though, I'd like to see this done as an experiment :) Since the Bun AI LLM 'exeriment' conversion got merged I'm a lot less trusting of 'experiments' with LLMs. They seem to get shipped
- roflmaostc 5mo agoI am fully aware of the costs and so on. But i can certainly imagine that LLMs help with the process of understanding and editing old code. And of course you need to test and debug before you ship to production.
- Rohansi 5mo ago> 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.
- rvnx 5mo ago
- jmclnx 5mo agoAs 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 ?
- norman784 5mo agoThat 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.
- philipwhiuk 5mo agohttps://github.com/Zaneham/voyager-fds-emulator https://github.com/Zaneham/voyager-fds-emulator
- philipwhiuk 5mo agoI believe they have both. Simulators for the spacecraft and replicas for some bits of hardware.
- rcxdude 5mo agoWhat 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.
- joseda-hg 5mo agoMaybe I'm used to think of NASA as this infinite budget agency, but considering Voyager's significance... To me that souns like we should test all revisions of the CPU, not none of them
- rob74 5mo ago> 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)...
- wglb 5mo agoRegarding "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 https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/enhance_vI.pdf.
- no-name-here 5mo ago[dead]
- vincent-manis 5mo agoI was puzzled by this claim, too. I think that the article is wrong, and that the code is written in HAL/S, a NASA-only language that sort of started off as a preprocessor to Fortran, though it has some PL/I-like features. If it really was written in Fortran, it probably was in a vendor-extended Fortran IV, which a lot of old guys like us know. But NASA used HAL/S for a number of projects, including the Shuttle. (And, by the way, thanks to perplexity.ai, here's a link to the HAL/S language manual: https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19750002029 https://archive.org/details/nasa_techdoc_19750002029.) The parent comment is apt. Of course, languages have their own quirks. But, as Christopher Strachey is once claimed to have said, “I use the same language no matter what compiler I run.” Now what is more likely to be true is that the code is strangely structured (both because structured programming was new then, and because of memory and processor limitations), and also that much of the internal documentation has been lost. I wish the article had been clearer on that.
- pklausler 5mo agoI think that the Voyager software is in assembly languages (there are several distinct computers on board), and that it is the program preparation software is written in a “Fortran V” extension.
- vincent-manis 5mo ago
- fuckinpuppers 5mo agoHow else will we be able to assist the crew of the Enterprise?
- ThinkingGuy 5mo agoWhy does the picture at the top of the article look more like Cassini–Huygens than Voyager?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]