If you throw enough money at the problem, the private sector probably could figure out a way to open ancient WordStar documents. But it'd be so much easier to avoid the problem in the first place...
I'm sure I could given a bit of time write a program to open wordstar documents even without a spec or reference implementation. I imagine the text itself is just stored as ASCII (even if it's not you could just brute force possible encodings until something legible came out). You might not manage to get the formatting 100% but that isn't really any worse than degredation of physical medium.
Hell we cracked the german army and naval codes without even really knowing what a computer was.
