Voyager’s legacy code still steers interstellar ships as aging engineers guard fading memory

NASA continues to run the Voyager probes with 1970s assembly-language software on purpose-built hardware, with total onboard memory around 64–70 KB. The operating team is small and aging, and much original documentation remains lost or scattered on paper, making it difficult to replace the few engineers who truly understand the code. The real challenge is preserving institutional memory and expertise as generations of specialists retire, not merely deciphering unreadable code, even as Voyager data transmission could continue into the mid-2030s.