Matt Gialich

that's going to take you, what, 20 days?

These things can be really slow.

So then you have to start thinking about, well, what kind of high-end compression do we use?

How does the spacecraft process these?

How many bits do we send back?

The nice thing about space is most of it's black, so you can just make it one bit pattern right as you go through.

But the details of communication are extremely hard when you go out that far.

It is not an easy problem to solve whatsoever and requires a whole bunch of infrastructure, what's called the Deep Space Network, to make it happen.

I mean, Voyager right now is 32 billion miles away from Earth.

Someone should fact check me on that because it might be 3.2 billion and I might have got my number wrong.

Whatever, billions.

Billions of miles away from Earth.

And I haven't done the link budget there.

It can keep going.

And I'm sure they can even slow down Voyager's bit rate even more to get farther.

But we can go pretty far.

It's an R squared loss on the distance we go out.

So it's going to keep getting farther and farther away.

And we'll be able to talk with it, hopefully, until the spacecraft actually fails.

I mean, think about that spacecraft.