Launched on Sept. 5, 1977—16 days after Voyager 2—Voyager 1 quickly overtook its twin as they journeyed to explore the outer solar system.
Today Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object, and on Nov. 18, it will reach another historic milestone: one light-day from Earth. At that distance, a signal from Earth will take 24 hours to reach the spacecraft—and another 24 hours to return.
@jackywacky_3 I think you’d see a very, very chopped down ETS-esque timeline where the only viable option would be apollo hardware for the foreseeable future. I don’t believe that they could do much outside of small unmanned research probes or a small scale space station in such a timeline
@jackywacky_3 sure, it was expensive and sure it could’ve been done better, but doing something like that genuinely leaves no path forwards for NASA as an entity to continue existing. If you thought the budget cuts after Apollo were bad, whatever would happen after that would be worse
@jackywacky_3 awful take. trading nearly 26 years of humans continuously living in space for a couple interplanetary expeditions and then no reasonable path forwards because no one (not even a cold war air force) would ever need the capacity of the MLV with aj260s or justify the price