The dirty truth is that every piece of software or infrastructure you deploy immediately becomes "technical debt," and you know the thing about debt is that it charges interest.

You can choose to neglect paying on your debt for some period of time, but it always comes back, more expensive, later. Case in point: the IT leaders that refused to upgrade from Windows XP and Server 2003 are now paying astronomical prices for "extended support" and "migration/rehosting." If they would have simply invested in maintenance to ensure compatibility with newer OS/browser combinations, they would not have this problem.

Pay now, or pay much much more later. Tech debt is a huge problem in IT, and ignoring it won't make it go away.

The prices charged for extended support are high but not astronomical and I don't think you answered the question on NASA.

I think the point here is that there is no such thing as a stable state in software. Maintaining old infrastructure to support old applications is not a steady-state, it is a degrading state. As bugs and exploits are discovered and patched in new versions of windows/browsers/databases/frameworks/libraries/etc the old systems degrade to a vulnerable, un-maintainable, unsupported and often un-upgradeable state.

I think we can all agree that NASA is a special case.

Also, is it 100% true that they dont update software on actuve systems mid mission?

What if they discover a critical bug?

Of course NASA updates software mid-mission; they're famous for sending software updates out to deep-space probes and rovers to fix things as critical as communication issues, which is quite a neat trick.

What they don't do is allow updates to happen automatically. They're carefully pre-tested, and the update is carefully planned and scheduled. Their goal, like most enterprises, is to minimize risk, and bugs that you know about and understand the impact of are much less risky than updated software you haven't been able to test yet.

In this example though, your app is the mars rover and Chrome is the rest of the Universe.

The Universe auto updates. So you need to update your rover when that happens.

NASA is not a special case. What about medical equipment, weapons , oil industry, stock trading, I bet other people here can think of more examples.