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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

I'm reading Pale Blue Dot to my kids at night currently so this is really awesome. (The Voyager missions are described in excellent detail in ways that I never appreciated fully before.)

It blows my mind that these are machines from the 8-track era. And they have fallbacks and redundancies that were completely ahead of their time.

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NASA loves to downplay expectations in case something goes wrong, but people really underappreciate just how overengineered these things are, which makes sense when a bad mission can be political suicide for their future funding.

It was also incredibly on budget. I think Sagan says in the book it cost the individual American taxpayers in the single digit dollars.

Single digit dollar sounds more like the Appollo program. I think it's been a long time since the entire NASA budget was more than a penny per tax dollar.

NASA says the voyager mission cost 865 million dollars from the start in 1972 to Neptune encounter in 1989, and currently runs at 7 mllion dollars per year.

So that would be $7.72 per taxpayer, a single-digit dollar amount.

(based on number of taxpayers in 1989 -- using the numbers from 1972, it would be a low double-digit amount).

Totalled up, yes - fair enough.

Cool! I do the same thing with books like Asimov’s Earth and Space (science) or Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (fictional history). What other books can you recommend?

Good question but I have a fever at the moment so unfortunately my brain is not fully functioning :/

Wishing you a speedy recovery

Yeah it's really amazing that these come from a time where normal people had never even heard of bits and bytes. And now they're the furthest man made objects and their data link still works.

One feels a terrible disappointment Sagan didn't live to see the future mission projects he talks about in the book get finished and most of them succeeded IIRC. By happenstance the 2024 Solar System BBC series mostly uses animation but has some real photos and videos to document a lot of happened since the book was published.

The last time I read Cosmos I hit the part about the Cassini-Huygens mission where he wondered what we might find under the atmosphere of Titan, and was able to immediately just find out.

I imagine a lot of people who work on space missions do not outlive their work - which feels sad but also ... inspiring?

I think Carl Sagan would overall just kind of be deeply sad about how it is turning out.

“In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.”

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