[pjerem]

The spacecraft should generate the key pairs itself once it landed and send the public keys to earth to be sure no human stole the private keys.

But, while fun, your idea is not that stupid.

If the spacecraft continuously generate key pairs, you could even avoid landing it and "just" throw it in some direction, Voyager style (if you can afford rebuilding some every few decades) or on some orbit in the solar system. You don’t have to pay for the landing tech.

I wouldn’t even be surprised that this could be viable economically. It doesn’t sound that much technologically difficult

[troymc]

These are all good improvements. Thanks!

My thinking now is that you could send the spacecraft out to Neptune and do a gravity-assist maneuver there, sending the spacecraft into a large orbit around the Sun, with a high perihelion.

[bigyikes]

>I wouldn’t even be surprised that this could be viable economically.

Do you imagine there's a large market for physically-based time locked encryption?

Hard to imagine there's a ton of paying customers lol

[pjerem]

I really don't know. I wouldn't be surprised that, on the entire planet, a niche market could exist that would want to pay the premium over say, giving an envelope to a notary.

You could also change the business model to allow NOT decrypting messages by paying the message author (and take a commission) but I guess that would attract more than shady customers :)