Voyager Wires
Voyager Wires
[In the bottom right corner is a space probe, with large satellite dish and long antenna. Behind it runs a long wire, that makes three loops before it is connected to North America  on the Earth in the top left corner. To the left of the Earth there is a second wire, which goes off-panel to the left.]
[Caption below the panel:] Sad news: Due to high copper prices and budget constraints, NASA may finally have to cut the wires that they've been spooling out to communicate with Voyager 1 and 2.

This comic claims that the Voyager probes communicate with NASA though ridiculously long copper wires. These wires would have to be continuously lengthened as the probes travel away from Earth. Supposedly, because of "high copper prices and budget constraints," they may not be able to afford to lengthen the wires much longer. If this occurred, they would have to either cut the wires or let them break, which would prevent any further communication with the probes. In reality they use radio waves , not long copper wires, so this will not actually happen.
If copper wires were dragged by the Voyager probes, assuming a 1mm² thick cable, 550 tons of copper would be needed per hour and it would add 1 million Ohm per hour to the cable resistance. At $8,560/ton , this would cost $41 billion dollars/year, which would be nearly twice NASA's entire annual budget .
The resulting wire would slow down the probes by drag unless the wire itself was actively suspended (i.e. accelerated) continuously as it was fed. The wire could not be used for any other mechanical purpose such as a space elevator for this reason.
Since the Earth spins, the wires would also spool around the Earth, slowing the probes down even further. Clearly, this is not a good idea. This problem might be avoided if the wires reached earth at one of the poles. Or perhaps they could go to an airplane that flies around earth at exactly 15 degrees of longitude per hour, with periodic air-to-air refueling, so that it is always on the side of the earth facing the probe.
Because the Voyager probes aren't in the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun, the Earth would not, in its rotation around the sun, drag these copper wires through the sun. If it did, the wires would melt.
The title text references the phenomenon seen with self-retracting cables, such as are commonly found on vacuum cleaners, where the free end of the cable, where the plug is, oscillates more and more wildly as the cable approaches full retraction, leading to the danger of a painful rap on the hand if it is not withdrawn in time. A planet-sized impact of this kind could cause severe damage.
A few days before this comic was released, NASA had reported receiving corrupted data from the Voyager 1 probe.  The fact that they are receiving any data at all means that the attitude control system must be working (or else the antenna would not point at Earth), but they continue to investigate how that data could be corrupted after that point.
Spoiler alert
The consequence of a cable between a craft in space and a planetary location being suddenly retracted was recently imagined in the first episode of the Apple TV+ series Foundation , wherein a space elevator tether was severed. It didn't end well for anyone other than the terrorists who won the freedom of thousands of inhabited worlds which had formerly suffered under the jackbooted oppression of Trantor 's fascist galactic Empire regime.
Another illustration in fiction of a severed space elevator is in Red Mars, part of the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.
[In the bottom right corner is a space probe, with large satellite dish and long antenna. Behind it runs a long wire, that makes three loops before it is connected to North America  on the Earth in the top left corner. To the left of the Earth there is a second wire, which goes off-panel to the left.]
[Caption below the panel:] Sad news: Due to high copper prices and budget constraints, NASA may finally have to cut the wires that they've been spooling out to communicate with Voyager 1 and 2.
