I've heard this before and it does sound like the most epic hack in the history of programming.

100 million miles

That looks like about 9 light minutes away, so about 18 minute latency! It might be super epic, but doesn't sound super nice. :)

Recently there was a bit of a fuss when people discovered that the Mars Ingenuity helicopter runs Python3. Now I wonder, if its software ever crashes, will people be able to just launch the Python REPL and debug it?

Qem, That is the thing about functional programming in general. Data is the centerpiece. State is just data. Program is just data. Capture data, feed it locally and get results.