The amazing thing (to me) is that they developed the Voyager spacecraft in an era when space flight wasn't hugely popular and the budgets at NASA were being cut regularly. NASA went from a peak of $6bn a year in the mid-sixties under Johnson to almost half that under Ford and Nixon. The engineers were well-respected and they clearly felt the work was important, but they weren't particularly well paid. They did this for the love and the science.
I’d hardly call the graduate papers coming out of academia equivalent to the level of innovation & creativity of what the engineers above described. Perhaps they’re both underpaid, but one is certainly more amazing. Hardly the same.
Remember also that a large fraction if not a majority of the Voyager team almost certainly had PhDs or even came from academia. I think we can appreciate innovation and creativity everywhere without having to make it into a genital measuring contest.
My grandfather built satellites at Lockheed in Sunnyvale all through the 60s and 70s and it was a glorious time for him. For reasons that I never quite understood, he hated Reagan for "destroying the industry" in the 80s (by which time he was in Denver at MM).
You’re not familiar with how much money as a percentage of GDP we spent in the 1960s? It’s noteworthy.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#Annual_budget
We were building the Space Shuttle and exploring the planets.
I wish we could spend money on NASA like we did in the 1970’s
In the 60s, they were pushing to get things out and accepted risk levels that today we would consider intolerable.
Today we've developed a cost-plus contracting approach plus insane safety and success standards that mean it is almost impossible to actually get anything done. With one notable exception - SpaceX.
Just throwing money into Boeing and Lockheed these days would generate profits for them, but not a lot of science for us. We need to change culture as well.
I remember someone on HN telling me several years ago that Virgin Galactic would be back quickly.
I absolutely agree. It's far worse now. And, not at all coincidently, NASA is doing much less science now. A return to the 70s budget by GDP would be good, but a return to the 60s budget by GDP would be even better.
I'd love to see NASA's budget increased, but not now - it would just get funneled into dead-end pork projects like SLS. I'd much rather wait till Starship is successfully operating (New Glenn would be a plus), and it is political viable to end the SLS entirely, and redirect all that money and some into missions (both science and exploration) rather than hardware development.
Or to put it another way, it isn't worth it to me to spend 1960's era money if we are only going to get 1960's era results. If we ever want to move on to bigger things in space, like colonization, we can't just throw money at the problem, we need to find ways to bring the cost down first.
[0] https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al...
I did recognize the style, and then reading the comments Isaw it was indeed by David “Elite” Braben.
Watch this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbsfeubbRA Quite a journey from there to here
- http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=63 (PC; page has link to source code)
In space, however, you can only run the hardware in it's destined environment once. Software is critical to the design process regardless of the HW costs.
They did an absolutely amazing job and I take it as a given that this was not some novice mistake.
I would tend to assume they've thought of that though, and stuck with this part for reasons. Maybe there werent other space-ready alternatives or something.
On the other hand, if they had to budget for a second copy of everything in advance they may have never gotten to launch. Asking for the funding after already having good success behind them is likely a lot easier.
Things are tested all the time in factories. For how long? Till destruction.
When it comes to space missions, common sense starts bad and rapidly gets worse — there is no down, there is no “now”, metals can contact-weld without any supply of energy, exposed fluids boil until they freeze, radiation pressure is relevant, ionising radiation doses can be enough to break things, impact damage is radically different, launch times are prescribed by orbital dynamics, engines are more efficient when they are moving faster, fuel use is exponential with regard to change in velocity and nothing to do with distance, and the launch mass is heavily constrained. And that’s just the stuff I know from following Scott Manley and similar on YouTube — I’m a very long way from being a rocket engineer.
You hit the date, you test what you can, within that constraint.
(They were also heavily budget limited, and I’m sure everyone here has an example of a project which became more expensive because someone decided they “couldn’t afford testing”).
Even then, even despite people who probably have PhDs in specific engineering topics I can’t even name, half the time you can’t even tell what’s important to test vs “it’s common sense this will work fine for a thousand cycles” — hence the long list of missions which failed catastrophically.
It is rocket science.
Voyager 2 emerged from behind Saturn (as seen from the Earth) in August 1981. The scan platform had been moving feverishly—pointing here and there among the rings, moons, and the planet itself during the all-too-brief moments of close approach. Suddenly, the platform jammed. A stuck scan platform is a maddening predicament: knowing that the spacecraft is flying past wonders that have never been witnessed, that we will not see again for years or decades, and the incurious spacecraft staring fixedly off into space, ignoring everything.
The scan platform is driven by actuators containing gear trains. So first the JPL engineers ran an identical copy of a flight actuator in a simulated mission. This actuator failed after 348 turns; the actuator on the spacecraft had failed after 352 turns. The problem turned out to be a lubrication failure. Good to know, but what to do about it? Plainly, it would be impossible to overtake Voyager with an oilcan.
The engineers wondered whether they could restart the failed actuator by alternate heating and cooling; maybe the resulting thermal stresses would induce the components of the actuator to expand and contract at different rates and unjam the system. They tested this notion with specially manufactured actuators in the laboratory, and then jubilantly found that in this way they could start the scan platform up again in space. Project personnel also devised ways to diagnose any additional trend toward actuator failure early enough to work around the problem. Thereafter, Voyager 2’s scan platform worked perfectly. All the pictures taken in the Uranus and Neptune systems owe their existence to this work. The engineers had saved the day again.
Our hacks are nothing compared to the hacks of these old school nasa programmers :)