Again I’ll admit to the election leaving me feeling like I’d been kicked in the crotch, then gut-punched and knocked flat by a knee to the face when I doubled over. Regaining a will to fight back has been a process to be sure. I’m working on it and will keep doing so. One thing I can turn to is events that took place in my lifetime that were astounding. And in the case of the incredible journey of Voyager 1 ongoing. Allow me to explain.
Back in the 1970s a pair of spacecraft, probes designed to explore for the first time some of the outer planets in our solar system were launched. Both far exceeded both their design life and original mission objectives. Also, as shown in the title photo both Voyagers contained a record made of gold with all manner of recordings should any being from another world find the spacecraft. Something they could use to know a bit about life on our tiny blue ball as it was in the 1970s. Also, it was Voyager 1 which before shutting off its cameras for the last time turned back towards earth to take a few remarkable photographs. One became known as the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ photo and you can learn more about that iconic image here.
It’s worth noting that three and a half decades ago when that photo was taken Voyager was “only” 3.7 billion (that’s billion with a B) miles from earth. It’s kept right on going. All the way out of our heliosphere, the reach of our sun’s influence. Voyager is well into Interstellar space, over FIFTEEN billion miles away now. And it was still sending back data. Not as much of course. Long past the point where the sun could provide solar power it’s been reliant on power from a small bit of radioactive material. The decay is used to generate power. It’s meant a lot of difficult decisions about what equipment/data gathering to shut down. More are yet to come. Still, it’s out there and working.
A year ago it was looking like the end. As this article from Daily Galaxy explains the spacecraft’s X-Band transmitter shut down in mid-October, 2023. That left only the less powerful and unreliable (due to difficulty the Deep Space Network has finding and communicating with such a distant object with such a weak transmission) S-Band transponder. The linked article is worth the read if you enjoy space stuff but the short version is that systems are designed to automatically shut down sometimes when fault show up to prevent catastrophic failure to the entire spacecraft. Too many repeats or too many different faults and the thing goes into what in effect is safety mode. That’s what happened and it was feared that was pretty much it.
However some of the engineers at NASA refused to give up. Bear in mind these are people who were raised on entirely different engineering knowledge and technology from hardware to software than existed when Voyager was designed and built. But they learned what they needed to know, and figured out how to use what we can do now to work with what Voyager has. Must be frustrating as hell for them but my point in writing this is that they looked at a seemingly hopeless situation – and refused to give up.
They decided somehow, some way they’d figure out how to get enough commands to Voyager (and from it) to figure out what had gone wrong and how to fix it. Kind of like where we as Democrats are right now. At least a lot of us. I felt hopeless the morning after the election. I was a close as I’ve ever been to the darkest of places inside. I realized how bad off I was and got on the horn to my Psychiatrist’s office at the VA. Before the day was out I’d spoken with someone who put in the counseling referral. Just knowing help was on the way (my counseling starts next week in fact) has been enough for me to keep trying to build resolve again. Brick by brick. Figure out the problems and solve them one-by-one.
That’s what the people at NASA spent a year doing with Voyager. Painstaking, difficult work. First trying to use limited data to figure out what had gone wrong – why even though the spacecraft was still working (albeit in a limited ‘safe mode’ status) it would no longer communicate with Earth, at least in any meaningful way. Ever so gingerly they had to test out solutions. Doing the wrong thing could after all be worse than doing nothing. But somehow they figured out how to get the X-Band communications system functioning again and Voyager has sent back a stream of data in recent weeks.
As I said more systems for data gathering are being shut down. Only a little of what Voyager could once do will continue to be done. But roughly a half-century past its launch it’s still out there and WORKING. That’s the point my friends. When it seems like all is lost, and the ability to even try to figure out what went wrong is almost impossible some people figure out how to get something priceless working again.
That friends is the country I grew up in. Flawed to be sure. It always has been. Sometimes we’ve taken steps backwards even. I’m betting, as Ursula suggested in another article earlier this evening it won’t be long before a large chunk of voters who (barely) put Trump back in the WH turn on him just like happened the first time. We have to hold out until then. Also, in the meantime we have to (and without the sniping and nastiness we’ve seen from some of our leaders, consultants and pundits) figure out what, if anything might have been done differently or better this year.
We will I’m sure identify things large and small. However keep in mind that Trump didn’t even get 50% of the popular vote and his Electoral College margin was, just as was the case in the past two Presidential elections relatively low by historical standards. HALF of us don’t like the election results. We face a choice. We can whine and pity ourselves and mourn the death of the America we knew, or we can like anyone experiencing grief mourn AND start figuring out how to carry on and build anew. We need to be ready to take advantage of each opening Trump gives us (and there will be plenty) to reach out to those voters who got suckered by Trump. Figure out how to recognize doubt in them and water that doubt like we are tending to a garden.
I think what those folks at NASA did with Voyager is exactly the kind of thing we should think of. Hard, difficult work. But by god they figured it out. So can we.
It’s a great metaphor. Thanks Denis.
Thanks Denis … well done .. as was the work on the ancient systems NASA did.
Take care, all of you.