Happy 40th Anniversary to Voyager 1 sending and receiving information since September 5th 1977! This is Such a Marvelous Creation!

 

How about a link?

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

 

Damn, I had no idea that they were still functioning. The name still makes me think of the first Star Trek movie........ V-GER, V-GER...........

 

It blows me away that NASA is able to receive data from something so far away using less power than a cars clock.

Roger.

 

A few years back the morons in congress were going to cut the Nasa budget, including the funding for monitoring the voyagers. Thankfully enough people, including me, called our reps & voiced our outrage over their stupidity & the program was saved!! They are the only man made objects to ever leave our solar system! They "only" cost a couple million a year for a small group of people to take care of data they send back. It is incredible that they're still functioning!!

 

It is pretty cool that 40 y/o tech is still functioning. I can't even get that many years of service out of most newer tv's. I think they said they are planning on monitoring them until 2030.

 

Yep. and searching for the creator...

 

Unfortunately in 1994, Congress stopped all funding for the greatest science project that was planned, The Super Conducting Supercollider. Everything that was spent up until that time was a waste, $4.5 billion thrown down the drain. And another $3.5 billion to remove everything and renew the property back to the way it was. I was there to the very end, moving and scrapping all of the special equipment that was designed and built for that one purpose.

 

But your TV didn't cost $20 million, either. The components used on Voyager were built with hardiness and redundancy in mind because it was thought we might want them to last far longer than the length of the original mission. No one builds TVs or any consumer electronics this way.

 

Most folks under 30 don't even know what "Durable Goods" are.
They sure don't make 'em like the used to. That's for damn sure.
Sucks that society has become 'throw away'. But I digress...

 

Science owes you and your fellow lobbyists a big thank you. So does the rest of mankind come to that. Any authority that wants to restrict or suppress research and knowledge need to be kept in check.

Roger.

 

OK, how about we all step back and take a deep breath. No one is trying to "suppress research and knowledge." It's just that there is only so much money for all that government tries to do, and sometimes choices have to be made. Provide more money for Medicaid or more to watch a space ship travel ever farther away from the solar system? It's not a simple judgment to make, and there are equally valid arguments on both sides.

It's nice that we can still pay attention to these distant spaceships. But that was never part of the original mission, and if the Voyagers and Pioneers and whatever had been turned off the moment their primary missions ended, that would have been fine. NASA left it so that, IF money could be found down the road, they would keep in contact with the spaceships for as long as possible. But there is not and never has been a guarantee that this would continue indefinitely, and we should be grateful that they have been provided the funding to continue to do so for as long as they have.

 

Eric,
I agree with you to a point BUT when the government has plenty of money for stupid things such as listed below, I have to disagree.

#1 The U.S. government is spending $750,000 on a new soccer field for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay.

#2 The Obama administration plans to spend between 16 and 20 million dollars helping students from Indonesia get master’s degrees.

#3 If you can believe it, the U.S. government has spent $175,587 “to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior”.

#4 The U.S. government spent $200,000 on “a tattoo removal program” in Mission Hills, California.

#5 The federal government has shelled out $3 million to researchers at the University of California at Irvine to fund their research on video games such as World of Warcraft. Wouldn’t we all love to have a “research job” like that?

#6 The Department of Health and Human Services plans to spend $500 million on a program that will, among other things, seek to solve the problem of 5-year-old children that “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.

#7 Fannie Mae is about to ask the federal government for another $4.6 billion bailout, and it will almost certainly get it.

#8 The federal government once spent 30 million dollars on a program that was designed to help Pakistani farmers produce more mangos.

#9 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once gave researchers at the University of New Hampshire $700,000 to study methane gas emissions from dairy cows.

#10 According to USA Today, 13 different government agencies “fund 209 different science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education programs — and 173 of those programs overlap with at least one other program.”

#11 A total of $615,000 was given to the University of California at Santa Cruz to digitize photos, T-shirts and concert tickets belonging to the Grateful Dead.

#12 China lends us more money than any other foreign nation, but that didn’t stop our government from spending 17.8 million dollars on social and environmental programs for China.

#13 The U.S. government once spent 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly.

#14 One professor at Stanford University was given $239,100 to study how Americans use the Internet to find love.

#15 The U.S. Postal Service spent $13,500 on a single dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse.

#16 The National Science Foundation once spent $216,000 to study whether or not politicians “gain or lose support by taking ambiguous positions”.

#17 A total of $1.8 million was spent on a “museum of neon signs” in Las Vegas, Nevada.

#18 The federal government spends 25 billion dollars a year maintaining federal buildings that are either unused or totally vacant.

#19 U.S. farmers are given a total of $2 billion each year for not farming their land.

#20 The U.S. government handed one Tennessee library $5,000 for the purpose of hosting a series of video game parties.

#21 A few years ago the government spent $123,050 on a Mother’s Day Shrine in Grafton, West Virginia. It turns out that Grafton only has a population of a little more than 5,000 people.

#22 One professor at Dartmouth University was given $137,530 to create a “recession-themed” video game entitled “Layoff”.

#23 According to the Heritage Foundation, the U.S. military spent “$998,798 shipping two 19-cent washers from South Carolina to Texas and $293,451 sending an 89-cent washer from South Carolina to Florida”.

#24 The U.S. Department of Agriculture once shelled out $30,000 to a group of farmers to develop a tourist-friendly database of farms that host guests for overnight “haycations”.

#25 The National Institutes of Health paid researchers $400,000 to find out why gay men in Argentina engage in risky sexual behavior when they are drunk.

#26 The National Institutes of Health also once spent $442,340 to study the behavior of male prostitutes in Vietnam.

#27 The National Institutes of Health loves to spend our tax money on really bizarre things. The NIH once spent $800,000 in “stimulus funds” to study the impact of a “genital-washing program” on men in South Africa.

#28 According to the Washington Post, 1,271 different government organizations work on government programs related to counterterrorism and homeland security.

#29 The U.S. government spent $100,000 on a “Celebrity Chef Fruit Promotion Road Show in Indonesia”.

#30 The feds once gave Alaska Airlines $500,000 “to paint a Chinook salmon” on the side of a Boeing 737

 

Nice list. Looks very canned. Yes, the government spends money stupidly. That's beside the point. The actual point is that whether or not the government continues to fund the tracking of these spaceships has to be considered against all of the other demands on government money.

Er, I don't think Obama is president any more. At least, he wasn't the last time I looked.

 

Yes, I googled wasteful gov't programs & that list from 2016 popped up, I don't know if they have a 2017 list yet.
Even if they are canned, that doesn't mean they are not wasteful.

 

It also doesn't mean that just because someone created a 'List' that all of it is based on FACT....... just sayin........ for example, try listening to FOX news for a while........

 

As opposed to what? CNN

 

Ah, Godwin's law at work. This thread started out being about the 40th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 1. Then it got into government spending priorities (and I admit that I participated in that). Now it's into which news channel is better. Soon someone will get compared to Hitler, and the cycle will be complete.

Godwin's Law:

"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

 

Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy: quote a "law" to make sure it comes true. I'd wager the subject would never have come up otherwise if the master baiter in this thread hadn't done so.

Started out as a nice thread, anyway.

 

This comment makes no sense. I didn't compare anyone to Hitler. I just pointed out that the conversation was headed that way. But we've learned from long experience that you've never let the facts get in the way of a good rant.

 

Dummy brought it up again.

The conversation was not headed that way. Until it went that way.

 

Jaunty, you have a valid point.
It is human nature to have an enquiring mind. If we didn't we would have gone extinct millions of years ago.
In the case of the Voyager program enough people cared enough about it to keep it funded.
Lobbying is how things get done in the murky world of spending taxpayers money. In this particular case I'm glad it went the way it did. Of course none of my taxes were involved, as most of you will be aware.

Roger.

 

Maybe I should have got a special plate for my '77 Cutlass...."VOYAGER".