7 ms·
It's mind boggling that they didn't digitize every last scrap of paper around the project years ago, for starters.
by RagnarD 4mo ago
It's mind boggling that they didn't digitize every last scrap of paper around the project years ago, for starters.
- birdsongs 4mo agoI mean, they were never meant to last this long. NASA has a shoestring budget. I understand not taking the time and resources to do that when it could stop working a week later.
- rvnx 4mo agoNASA has a significantly larger overall budget than SpaceX for info
- sumeno 4mo agoAnd far more responsibilities too. You can't just directly compare budgets
- birdsongs 4mo agoHow is that at all relevant to my comment? Spacex isn't part of this conversation. A budget is a budget and all I said was I understood digitizing being down prioritized as a project when you have to get other things done (like SLS).
- egorfine 4mo agoI'm pretty sure volunteers will happily do this if NASA gave permission.
- londons_explore 4mo agoKeeping a filing cabinet in the basement is awfully cheap...
- no-name-here 4mo agoPer the article, “much of the original documentation has been lost or fragmented. Voyager paperwork from the 1970s and 1980s was largely paper, and each time the project moved offices, more of it disappeared”.
- throwaway27448 4mo agoTearing down the project is even cheaper. But presumably we're alive for a reason
- thadt 4mo agoMaybe not years ago, but scanning documents with the phone in your pocket has become incredibly efficient. That combined with AI transcription and indexing for search makes such a project faster and cheaper in 2026 than at almost any other time in the past.
- kccqzy 4mo agoI scanned an entire book in 2016. It was way faster than scanning with the phone in my pocket. It’s just not ergonomic to use a general purpose device (a phone) instead of a specialized device (dedicated scanner).
- thadt 4mo agoAgreed. I scanned a short book with my phone, and a dedicated scanner would have been nice to have. But with page flattening and separation and automated capture, it went much faster than I would have thought. If I were going to do a lot more, I'd want something like a scan tent [1]. It's not as ergonomic as a dedicated solution, but in 2026 a phone and some light can get you a lot of the way there, pretty fast. [1] https://www.transkribus.org/scantent https://www.transkribus.org/scantent