Dispatching a Throw That Will Never Return.

Most filings at this desk concern throws that end — that land, settle, or are recovered. The Voyager Golden Record is the rare case opened with the explicit understanding that it will never close.

In 1977 NASA affixed a gold-plated copper phonograph record to each of two Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 2 departed on 20 August, Voyager 1 that September, each carrying an identical disc bolted to its flank in an aluminum jacket.

A committee chaired by Carl Sagan assembled the contents: 115 encoded images, spoken greetings in fifty-five languages, ninety minutes of music from Bach to Chuck Berry, whale song, and the ambient sound of a planet its recipients will never visit.

The cover is itself a set of filing instructions — a diagram of the stylus, a pulsar map fixing Earth's location, and a sample of uranium-238 whose decay lets any finder date the throw. The Desk approves of self-documenting cargo.

No acknowledgment is expected; the Desk has filed a throw with no receiving party.

Both records are now traveling at roughly seventeen kilometers per second. Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012, formally exiting every jurisdiction this office recognizes.

Recovery is not merely unlikely; it is not contemplated. The nearest stellar approach lies tens of thousands of years downrange, and the gold surface is engineered to survive on the order of a billion years.

The Desk notes, without sentiment it can defend, that this is the longest-duration throw on the books and the only one addressed to a party whose existence remains unconfirmed.

Compliance verdict: A governed release with no expected return, no receiving jurisdiction, and a manifest longer than the civilization that sent it. Ruled valid, open, and permanently pending.