The US Government's Brain Drain Has Reached Alarming Levels
Where have all the geniuses gone?
Photographer: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
In November 2023 and more than 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, started sending gibberish back to mission control. The signals received from Voyager are only one ten-quadrillionth of a watt strong, or about one twenty-billionth of the power of a digital watch. But those infinitesimal signals still transmit valuable scientific data. So the Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to debug 40-year-old code running on hardware designed before anyone on the current team was born, working across a distance so vast that each command takes 22.5 hours for a round trip, and do it all with systems that have just under 70 kilobytes of memory.
They pulled it off! Engineers sent a command that returned a full memory dump of the flight data system. They identified a single corrupted chip, realized no single location in the tiny memory could accommodate relocating the affected code, and devised a workaround that split the code into pieces and distributed it across functioning memory. It was a technical miracle performed by peerless scientists and engineers, requiring both brilliance and institutional memory built over decades.