Irretrievability; or, Murphy's Curse of Oneshotness upon ASI (opens in new tab)

Example 1: The Viking 1 landerIn the 1970s, NASA sent a pair of probes to Mars, Viking 1 and Viking 2 missions, at a total cost of $1B[1970], equivalent to about $7B[2025]. The Viking 1 probe operated on Mars's surface for six years, before its battery began to seriously degrade.One might have thought a battery problem like that would spell the irrevocable end of the mission. The probe had already launched and was now on Mars, very far away and out of reach of any human technician's fixing fi...