Actually, I believe they stand a decent chance of some future billionaire recovereing them and putting them into a museum or a private collection in a hundred years or so.
That writeup, while accurate, was back in 2013 before Starship / Super Heavy was a serious concept. And if everything pans out with it, we can get huge amounts of stuff up a lot cheaper. It even says that an ion drive (based on 2013 technology) will work, but we will have an issue with re-capture once it gets to Earth.
That can be solved with a much larger ion drive, which will be much cheaper to launch (along with appropriate amounts of propellant) using Starship (or its future successors). And if a wealthy individual that has everything wants to retrieve that golden record for his personal collection, and is willing to spend a couple billion on it, well I'm sure that Musk's great grandkid will be more than willing to oblige.
Interesting thank you. That's what my second question was going to be, if it could stop it and bring it back and how hard that might be. Seems the answer is- very hard.
