re: #159 No Malarkey!

Whenever you are dealing with a software issue, think about this: from 15 billion miles away, NASA engineers were able to figure out that a 46 year old computer chip on Voyager One had been corrupted, and successfully recoded Voyager’s computer system to bypass that chip, enabling it to start resending useable data to NASA again. I am constantly amazed at what NASA is able to achieve with half century old technology.

In the engineering trade, there are a couple phrases that address out-of-date technology and its care and feeding. The first is “technical debt” which is applied as your design ages, growing increasingly further behind modern tech. The second phrase addresses having to support this aging, far out-of-date tech. This practice is referred to as “being chained to a corpse”.

In NASA’s world, not only do both apply to their spacecraft, they revel in the successful practice of overcoming them.