After reaching the milestone of one light-day in distance away from Earth, NASA has reluctantly admitted it thinks its ancient spacecraft might not return.
At a press conference a sullen and emotional Controller, Todd Verniczek, explained: ‘We at the Voyager Program are ready to accept what we previously could not; that V, Voyager One, is probably not… coming back.
‘We’ve been checking the telemetry every two minutes since 2012 when V entered interstellar space for deviations in course, but shoot, nothing. We send occasional touchy-feely kind of messages out there, like: ‘Hey! What’s up, big guy?’, ‘No pressure, Buddy. Just wondering if you wanna grab a beer back here?’ But nothing, nada.
‘We didn’t give V specific instructions to return, we just thought it would have a neat cruise around the solar system, buzz around the emptiness of space for a while, then drift back when low on gas. It would be full of stories, showing photos, we were going to make a night of it.
‘It makes me wanna puke when I see Musk and Bezos whoop-di-wooing because their la-di-da spacecrafts return to the same spot from where they were launched. Jeez, talk about rubbing salt in the wound.
‘We used to tie yellow ribbons around the platform after every launch, that was exhausting, but we always had hope. Now we’ve reached the point where V is one light day away, so we reluctantly baked a cake and sang ‘24 light-hours from Tulsa’. That was the hardest…
‘They say, ‘If you love them set them free,’ and they come back. We did, and V hasn’t. What a dumbass phrase. Our last message was, ‘There’s a seat at the dinner table waiting for you V. It’s no biggie, we just thought… you know… come home.’’
When asked by a journalist, “Isn’t Voyager Two on a similar trajectory?’. Verniczek replied, ‘Wait… what?’
Image: PIRO4D - Pixabay
