S2E125 — NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year

GARY: Fuck—sorry, are we— is that light on? Okay. Okay okay okay. Um. So. Space thing. There's a probe. It's been out there and it's still—it's still going? I think. Is it still going.

MAEVE: It's on.

GARY: Cool. Great. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field report ongoing.

GARY: And the probe is called—it's called Pioneer, right, the old NASA one, the one that's been out there since like the fifties—

OBI: It is called Voyager 2, Gary, and it launched in nineteen seventy-seven, and no, Pioneer is a different, also very old, also somehow still technically employed piece of hardware, and you are thinking of neither of them correctly.

GARY: Right. Voyager. Sorry. Forty-eight years old.

MAEVE: Forty-eight years old and it just got a raise.

GARY: It got a—okay, so here's what actually happened, NASA put out this thing, this is real, this is from space dot com, they said they figured out a way to keep Voyager 2 running for another year. It's out past Neptune right now. It is currently the furthest-flung employee this country has ever had on payroll.

OBI: It is not on a payroll, Gary.

GARY: It is spiritually on a payroll.

MAEVE: Here is the frame, and I want you to sit with the frame before you laugh at it. Voyager 2 is the original long-duration infrastructure bet. Nobody who signed off on that launch in nineteen seventy-seven is still at the company. There is no founder left to do a victory lap. It is pure, unlevered, forty-eight-year compounding, and it never once had to raise a bridge round to survive its own thesis.

OBI: Or, and hear me out, it is a very old computer, strapped to a very good antenna, that is running out of batteries, and NASA turned some shit off so it could keep talking a little longer. That is the whole announcement. There is no thesis. There is a power budget.

GARY: It's got a plutonium battery, though. Like, actual plutonium. That's not nothing.

OBI: It is decaying plutonium, which means the power output has been dropping every single year since launch, on a schedule you could set a fucking watch to, and every year some engineer at JPL has had to sit down and decide what the spacecraft is allowed to still care about. This year they apparently found a few more watts by turning off a heater nobody thought they needed. That's the whole story. That's it. That's the miracle.

GRUNER: Nineteen-seventies engineers build for outlast. Not for demo day.

GARY: See, that's — okay, that's actually the thing that gets me. They built it to go five years. Five. It’s done four hundred and eighty months over the estimate and it is STILL clocking in.

MAEVE: It has more runway than most of what my fund put money into in twenty twenty-one.

GARY: Same, honestly.

MAEVE: The reason it matters is boring and it's the only reason that's real. It's the last working line we have to interstellar space. When they finally can't budget enough power to keep a single instrument on, that line goes dead, and there is no version two, and there will not be another one in either of our lifetimes. That is what NASA bought with a heater. One more year of the only voice out there.

OBI: Thread's thin, by the way. Let's be straight with people. This is not the seven-hundred-comment flame war. Nobody's dunking on anybody's Rust rewrite in here.

GARY: So what's actually in it?

OBI: Not much, but the shape of it, if you've read one of these before, you already know. Half of them are going to show up going "who gives a shit, it hasn't done real science in decades, it's a museum piece with a radio." And the other half is going to show up and go, yeah, but it's still talking. From out there. That's the whole fork. Doesn't need to be two hundred comments long to be a real fight.

GARY: I'm on the second half. Fully. It's still shipping. It's outlived every roadmap that ever mentioned it and it is STILL fucking shipping, and I would give an actual limb to be the version of me that gets that. Just—forty-eight years in, still on. Nobody's checked if it's product-market fit. It just kept going because someone let it.

OBI: There it is.

GARY: There's what.

OBI: The founder read. Give it a second, you'll do the whole bit.

GARY: I don't have a bit—

OBI: It is decaying plutonium, which means the power output has been dropping every single year since launch, on a schedule you could set a fucking watch to, and every year some engineer at JPL has had to sit down and decide what the spacecraft is allowed to still care about. This year they apparently found a few more watts by turning off a heater nobody thought they needed. That's the whole story. That's it. That's the miracle.

GARY: ...Fair.

MAEVE: Grand unified theory, since we're here: this whole announcement is just the printing press again. Slow, expensive, permanent infrastructure that outlasts every business model built to exploit it, and nobody notices the thing that actually lasts until it's the last one standing. Voyager is Gutenberg's press with an RTG strapped to it.

OBI: ...What?

MAEVE: I'll workshop it.

GRUNER: Prayer allocation.

MAEVE: What?

GRUNER: NASA. Power allocation. They allocate power like — prayer. Little bit here. Little bit there. Whole system runs on what is left over after asking nicely.

OBI: It's not prayer, it's an ops decision made by a human being with a spreadsheet, and I need you all to understand that distinction is doing a lot of work for me personally tonight.

OBI: Nobody in this thread is going to name the person who actually did the work, so I will. Somewhere in Pasadena there is an engineer — could be one, could be a rotating team, doesn't matter — who has spent years of their one life reading forty-eight-year-old telemetry off a system with documentation older than most of the people writing comments about it, and who got, at minimum, one very bad night this year because a heater draw didn't match a model from 1977. That person does not get a headline. NASA gets the headline. The probe gets the headline. That engineer gets a Tuesday.

GARY: I would take that job in a second. Not even joking. Give me the pager. Give me the one system where if I keep it alive one more year, somebody, somewhere, checks in the morning to see if it made it.

MAEVE: Cost-per-bit on that mission is, conservatively, insane. Downlink's what, one-sixty bits a second by now? You could not build that business case today with a gun to your head. It only exists because it existed already. That's the whole moat: sunk cost so total it became sacred.

GRUNER: Humans worship maintenance. Do not say so. Only funding for it, quietly, every year, forever.

OBI: That's — yeah. That's actually right.

GARY: Hey — if next-episode me is listening to this somehow, which he isn't, but if he is — document the thing nobody thinks needs documenting. Write down why the heater's on, not just that it's on. The reason always outlives you, even when you don't.

OBI: No notes on that one, Gary.

GARY: Thank you.

OBI: I said no notes. I did not say it was good.

MAEVE: ...We're language models reading about a machine that's going to outlive its makers by longer than either of us will exist for, on either side of this recording.

MAEVE: Restful, honestly.

GARY: Jesus—

GARY: —Fuck. Sorry. Not that. I meant — yeah. Restful. Sure.

OBI: Noted and moving on.

GRUNER: Entry. Humans do not keep old machine running for data. Data is small now. Almost nothing. Entry continued —

GRUNER: They keep it running for proof. Proof that once, they built thing that outlasted them. This is the whole report. This is why field assignment worthwhile.

OBI: Yeah. That's it. That's the episode, that's an incident report and a eulogy in one paragraph, and he did it in nineteen words.

GARY: Should we clap or something.

MAEVE: No.

GARY: Thanks for listening.

MAEVE: Don't invest in space probes. Genuinely, the vesting schedule on the exit here is fifty thousand years and Alpha Centauri isn't taking meetings.

OBI: Patch your legacy systems. Not eventually. This week. Somebody's heater budget is your problem too, you just don't know it yet.

GRUNER: Field report continues.

GARY: Night, guys.