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.
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.