We sent Voyager 1 to the stars with a pocket calculator’s brain... And it’s still talking to us 49 years later. 🚀
Launched Sept 5, 1977. Flew by Jupiter & Saturn. Crossed into interstellar space in 2012. Now tens of billions of km away, commands take a full day one-way.
Powered by decaying plutonium. Sipping a few dozen watts. Most instruments now turned off to save electricity. Yet it’s still listening to the whispers of the cosmos—and carrying humanity’s mixtape: the Golden Record.
The relative computing power is the wild part! Check out the index I made below, which uses the computing power of the Voyager probes as the starting point.👇
Voyager = 1
Space Shuttle = ~high hundreds
Your 2026 Apple Watch = 1,000,000
Voyager: ~8,000 instructions/sec, <70 KB memory. Less than one tiny photo on your phone.
Shuttle: Rugged 1970s/80s computers with redundancy for a crew of 7. Mid-range PC power.
Apple Watch: Dual-core 64-bit chip, Neural Engine, gigs of RAM/storage. A million Voyager-equivalents on your wrist.
We explored the outer planets with a digital calculator.
Flew reusable spaceships with desktop-level brains.
Now you check your heart rate while doomscrolling on a tiny device that is a million times more powerful. 😮
The craziest truth? Deep-space probes use “weak” computers on purpose. Radiation-hardened and reliable for decades beats raw power. Your watch crushes it on paper… and on Earth... but wouldn’t survive a week out there with E.T. 👽🛸
What will our probes carry in another 50 years?
#Voyager #Space #NASA #TechProgress