I worked as an RF engineer for a few years and one of the senior engineers once told me a story about how they launched Voyager (I think it was Voyager) with a Viterbi encoder, even though we didn't have the ability to make a decoder at that time due to lacking the computing power. So they launched it knowing they would eventually have the technology, and of course they were right. No idea if that's true or not but I love the story.