NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era
NASA continues to operate the Voyager spacecraft using software written in a 1970s-era programming language. While the popular narrative suggests that only a handful of engineers in their 80s maintain the code, the current team includes younger engineers as well. The spacecraft's onboard systems have limited memory and rely on outdated technology, but the mission has adapted over decades despite challenges in documentation and personnel transitions.
- ▪NASA operates the Voyager spacecraft using assembly language written for specialized processors from the 1970s.
- ▪The total memory of the Voyager computer systems is roughly 64 to 70 kilobytes, significantly less than modern standards.
- ▪Much of the original documentation for the Voyager mission has been lost or fragmented over the years.
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| Original publisher | Space Daily |
| Canonical URL | https://spacedaily.com/nasa-still-maintains-some-of-the-voyager-spacecraft-code-in-a-1970s-era-programming-language-that-almost-nobody-on-earth-fully-understands-anymore-and-the-handful-of-engineers-who-do-are-now-in-their/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 18 May 2026 10:43:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T11:14:56.450Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T11:14:56.450Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | o_rdf13iSwQB |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Constellations NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s The popular version of this story has hardened into a fixed shape. NASA still runs the Voyagers on software written in a programming language nobody alive can read, kept going by a handful of engineers all in their eighties, with no one queued up to replace them. By Space Daily Editorial Team · Editorial process Published May 16, 2026 The popular version of this story has hardened into a fixed shape.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Space Daily.
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