A spacecraft no larger than a small car, launched the year Star Wars came out, is still moving outward at 38,000 miles per hour far beyond the orbit of Pluto — and the radio signals it sends home, traveling at the speed of light, now take more than 23 hours to reach the engineers who built it, most of whom are no longer alive

A spacecraft no larger than a small car, launched the year Star Wars came out, is still moving outward at 38,000 miles per hour far beyond the orbit of Pluto — and the radio signals it sends home, traveling at the speed of light, now take more than 23 hours to reach the engineers who built it, most of whom are no longer alive

Voyager 1 has been in flight for longer than most of the people on Earth have been alive. The spacecraft was assembled, in essential respects, by a group of engineers and scientists who had grown up in the 1940s and 1950s, were trained in the 1960s, and arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena in the early-to-mid 1970s to work on what was conceived at the time as a four-year mission to study the outer planets. The mission scope was m…