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

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. In our reading of the record, parts of this are accurate. Parts are not. The underlying problem is real, and more specific than the headline suggests. What the spacecraft actually run T…