The doc is on paper, not properly organized, and the people who wrote it are mostly dead: https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-voyager-one-space-probe-los...

So they test in production, and they see what happens.

It's a really cool job they have (I'm not sarcastic), life-balance at NASA is known to be great ( = low to no pressure ) + since it's publicly funded, no clients, no profit to make, and if politics ask for feedback, you can claim anything and they can't verify it, and you can play with tech that others don't have the chance to see.

  > It's a really cool job they have (I'm not sarcastic), life-balance at NASA is known to be great ( = low to no pressure ) + since it's publicly funded, no clients, no profit to make [...]

I've known some NASA folks and they would not describe it as "low to no pressure". It's highly bureaucratic, constantly under budget pressure, and contractors get much of the cool work.

Don't know about voyager, but I expect that many of those folks have been there decades-- like a closed society. I am sure it's awesome for them, more power to them, but it's certainly not the norm.

I guess it depends on the team, and I tend to believe what you describe as well.

I didn't know about the contractors.

It still seems like a great place to work for, even in terms of social recognition.

It hit me just now that most of the people that designed programmed and launched this satellite are already dead

This sounds like a miscommunication. They probably don't have a simulator for the entire device, but attempting to fix the software without having an emulator of the computer would be downright irresponsible.

Exactly what I was thinking - it's virtually guaranteed they've spent the effort to build a software emulation solution.