Nearly five decades after leaving Earth, Voyager 1 is approaching its end not through catastrophe but through the quiet arithmetic of physics — four watts lost each year as its plutonium slowly ceases to decay. Humanity's most distant working machine continues to whisper back data from interstellar space, a place no other functioning spacecraft has ever reached, sustained not by the power it was born with but by the ingenuity of the people who refused to let it go quietly. Its decline is a planned one, a series of deliberate sacrifices that reveal something true about how great journeys conclu