Why Haven't the Voyager Spacecraft Ever Been Hacked?

HomeHosting OffersVPS Under $1NewsTutorialsInterviewsGiveawaysVideosLowEndTalkServerVerify About Hosting Guide (FAQ) Best VPS Hosting Submit Offer Submit Tip Advertise HomeHosting OffersVPS Under $1NewsTutorialsInterviewsGiveawaysVideosLowEndTalkServerVerifyWhy Haven't the Voyager Spacecraft Ever Been Hacked? raindog308 /Aug 20, 2026 @ 7:00 am / Comments (0)/nasa, voyager Share Post Share Reddit Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and are two of a handful of spacecraft that have entered interstellar space.  Two others (Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11) were launched several years earlier are now derelict and out of communication with the Earth, while New Horizons is much newer, having been launched in 2006.

The Voyager series have onboard computers that are beyond ancient by modern standards. There are a set of interconnected systems, which combined – combined! – have 32KB of memory.  From this, they power an array of scientific instruments and communicate with Earth.  They are custom hardware, not off-the-shelf electronics, and hold the world records for the oldest continuously-running computers, having been powered-on nonstop since 1977.  The CPUs operate at about 250Khz, which is four times slower than a Commodore 64.

There isn’t really an operating system per se, but rather a set of different integrated circuits to do specific things.  The design is more like a constellation of Arduino boards than a Raspberry Pi.

One interesting thing is that there’s no encryption or authentication per se.  Voyager was designed in the 1970s. It does not have something analogous to:

First, an attacker would have to get the signal to either Voyager, which isn’t trivial.  A nation state could do it, but the average Joe would need to have a lot of money to build a very large, very accurate transmitter. The spacecraft is billions of miles away, and the legitimate signal has to be carefully pointed and modulated.  A person on Earth could certainly build a transmitter capable of putting energy into the relevant frequency, but this is more of a billionaire’s secret black project than something a kid puts together from mail-order electronics.

This article was aggregated automatically by CyberWire Daily's newsfeed engine. Original reporting: lowendbox.com.