As it heads out of the solar system never to return, the deep space probe Voyager 1 is headed for yet another cosmic milestone. In late 2026, it will become the first spacecraft to travel so far that a radio signal from Earth takes 24 hours, or one light day, to reach it.
And therein lies the rub.
Although with some technologies, NASA has already fully closed down the projects and so would be starting from notes for the next round, having to figure out the implementation all over again.
Thankfully in the case of the Voyager program, there’s still a skeleton of it that’s fully operational, so replicating it would be astronomically simpler.