This is one of those things that sounds meaningful, but can be said about literally any problem in any system. Not all knowledge requires the same level of precision for confidence.

If the engineers at NASA who are familiar with the system say this is a known error state that will be fixed the next time the system designed to correct it fires on its set schedule, there’s not a whole lot added by saying sure, but what if they’re wrong?

It’s just restating the table stakes of existence.

I don’t think I’m prepared to lose another space robot.

You’re right, internet stranger. I bet they have not considered the possibility that Voyager 2 might have been eaten by a space whale. Like why aren’t the lame-stream fake news channels even discussing the space whale theory. Voyager 2 might even be intact inside the belly of the beast, and if NASA engineers haven’t factored this new data into their calculations about how fast a space whale would float through space with the additional mass and inertia of a functional probe, the signal could be lost forever.

I challenge Neil Degrass Tyson to a debate about space whales and how much they would theoretically be able to swallow whole.

That can’t be right. Is it?

assuming 8 inch

My, we are feeling bold aren’t we?

For those using the metric system, that’s 97930 gigabananas.

The weird thing to me is that that’s only about 23 football fields per person on earth. In other words, if each of us walks a mile and a half, all together we will have moved further than Voyager 2.

But private companies can do things public companies can’t do!¹

1. Because private companies don’t have the GOP actively sabotaging them whenever they are in power so that they can argue that private companies work better than public ones.²

2. Unless your private company supports groups that the GOP hates.

Very well. What government would you like to trust with this that can pull it off?

The US government? Heck I am confident that somewhere deep in federal bowls is my entire porn viewing history with my name on it. Also the US government only has SLS so to launch these they would have to build a new rocket or give the launch contracts to, well you guessed it SpaceX. Unless of course there is some more lobbying in which case ULA (Boeing) or Bezos. Tell me which poison you would prefer.

Russia? Seriously? Not even as a joke.

China? Maybe Russia wasn’t such a bad pick.

The minor space powers? South Korea, India, Israel, Japan? Even combined they couldn’t.

That just leaves the ESA (basically France and Luxembourg) which they are multiple years away from finishing their reusable rocket and only have one big launch site.

I am not against the idea of some government deciding that being an ISP to oceans and rural areas would be a good service and a nice revenue stream I just don’t see which government can do it and be trust too.

That is just another way of saying imposes negative externalities.

I think you know that you were oversimplifying here. It isn’t some weird-ass energy balance thing where all you can do is move the problem around. About half of my work is on government contracts and I can tell you first hand that it is very easy to make a bad project that costs more and gain nothing from it. I have personally been in multihour meetings with 6 or so engineers (with those billable hours) just to endlessly discuss the solution to the problem that had already been solved.

Just go ahead and pick some process you do in your daily life and try to do it inefficiently with no gain. You will find that it is trivially easy to do. There are more ways for something to be wrong vs being right. Which means that being right one way doesn’t mean that all ways of being right are equal.

I am wary of commercial anything

I won’t tell you not to be. Go ahead and be wary of it makes you feel better. I am wary of spending another 50 years stuck in LEO.

maybe then space commercialization might be a net benefit.

There is and never was a space program without commercial partners. It is only the question of to what degree. As of right now the HLS operating costs are far below the space shuttle program, less polluting, and should be safer. Given that half of the program failed that is even more of an achievement with the remaining 50%.

yet

But by the time we could there would be zero reason to anyway

A shift of 2° at 12.3 billion miles means it’s now pointing about 430 million miles away from the earth. The likelihood that it would be pointing at one of the small handful of man made objects that are out that far is infinitesimally small. Imagine being in a filed 100 miles wide and spinning a bottle with a laser pointer on it and hoping it lands pointing at a single bottle cap at the edge of the field. That would be magnitudes more likely than this pointing at one of our objects. And even if it did, those also would have antennas pointed at Earth so they couldn’t receive the message without turning which might cause the same issue for them.

We’re talking about the most proverbially gone shit in human history. Not only is it too far away, it is going faster than any man-made object has ever gone.

…And we once launched a massive metal disc out of a giant bore hole with a nuclear explosion.

Edit: actually Operation Plumbbob sent the steel bore cap nearly 4x as fast as Voyager. Suck it, nerds.

I’d guess even if some other man made satellite is perfectly in line, those wouldn’t have even close to the necessary transmission power to reach voyager.