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Data Engineering at 15 Billion Miles

Modern data engineers panic when an AWS region undergoes a minor blip or an upstream schema changes without notice. Imagine managing a critical data pipeline where a single round-trip debug command takes 45 hours, the compute layer has less than 70 KB of memory, and you can’t physically press the reset button.

This talk explores the extraordinary engineering principles of NASA’s Voyager program—specifically focusing on the historic 2024 remote software patch that rescued Voyager 1 from an otherwise fatal memory corruption anomaly. We will look past the history and dive deep into the architectural lessons data engineers can apply to modern cloud environments. From hardware-level fault isolation to decoupled stream formatting, you’ll discover how to design pipelines that survive in their own “interstellar space.”