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Saving Voyager 1! - Bruce Waggoner at !!Con 2024

!!Con · talk · Watch on YouTube

Space exploration & spaceflightTesting, debugging & developer tools

What it is

Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team describes how engineers diagnosed Voyager 1's 2023 loss of telemetry and patched its flight software from 15 billion miles away. The talk covers the spacecraft's architecture and the scarcity of old documentation.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as an amazing blind-debugging story with deep detail on 1970s spacecraft computing.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2024, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “The talk is amazing and goes through the computer architecture of the spacecraft”

    Blind debugging of Voyager's memory fault, covering architecture and old documentation

    tverbeure, 2024-09 · Strong recommendation · in “NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive”

  2. “I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team give a keynote at !!Con just last month.”

    Keynote by a Voyager team member on saving the probe

    Twisol, 2024-09 · Recommendation · in “NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive”

  3. “Check out this talk”

    Voyager source code is scattered across papers and computers

    Ductapemaster, 2024-10 · Recommendation · in “NASA reconnected with Voyager 1 after a brief pause”

  4. “You might like this and or find it inspiring, in case you haven't seen it already”

    Suggested as inspiring for the commenter's project

    asalahli, 2025-02 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: voyager, nasa, debugging, legacy systems, flight software, bangbangcon

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