I understand your point and completely agree that NASA has produced some amazing technological feats, but we could probably use a different example than the SLS to highlight their accomplishments. Even with supposedly repurposed rocket engines and technology from the Shuttle era, that project is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule. If you want to highlight how amazing it is that SLS has actually flown with all the political manipulations associated with it, then I'd probably agree with you in that sense. This is no criticism of the engineers, but to completely ignore the issues of this project as a whole, not just financially related, seems to be a bit disingenuous.

Here’s a good article from Berger talking about what the Government Accountability Office thinks of the project: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-what-everyone-already-knows-sls-is-unaffordable

Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)

The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.

And yeah, I'm calling it V'Ger from now on

Have my upvote.

Why haven't we been doing this already? I'm with you, let's make this happen!