It's great, but hardly amazing. Most academic research is done by underpaid PhD and postdoc students for the love of science, and most of that is far less glamorous than SPACE.
I’d hardly call the graduate papers coming out of academia equivalent to the level of innovation & creativity of what the engineers above described. Perhaps they’re both underpaid, but one is certainly more amazing. Hardly the same.
Remember also that a large fraction if not a majority of the Voyager team almost certainly had PhDs or even came from academia. I think we can appreciate innovation and creativity everywhere without having to make it into a genital measuring contest.