How do you propose to power a fleet of spacecraft at 550AU? Would you be able to acquire enough RTGs? What about DSN time for the downlink?
As for how to get there, yes, innovative propulsion is required. My idea is that the probe would dive close to Sun and use solar energy (sail? electric propulsion?) to accelerate itself out to hundreds of km/s.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
Voyager-1 is the fastest at 38,000 mph (61000 km/h) with respect to the Sun, but currently about 90,000 mph (144000 km/h) relative to earth (I guess this fluctuates annually).
Politicians and bureaucrats want immediate results, so a "launch now and see results in 30 years" mission – by which time many of the senior decision-makers will likely be dead – is going to be less attractive than competing missions offering results much sooner.
If you go back through the history of space exploration, it is full of proposals that "by year X we will be doing Y!" which never came to pass, because the money never turned up.
This makes me sad. The entire point of Government is to be an enterprise spanning multiple generations.
Of course, non-democratic systems have their own, equally serious downsides. Consider China: a system which is arguably much better at making long-term investments in public infrastructure than most democratic countries are (witness China's high-speed rail system), but also a system which ruthlessly suppresses dissent and locks up over a million of its citizens in "re-education camps"
Not in a democracy. The point of a government in a democracy is to serve the current will of the people. The government itself might last many generations, but its goals and motivations change with every election cycle.
In practice, hereditary absolute monarchy suffers from the problem of the dud heir: Marcus Aurelius is remembered as one of the greatest Roman Emperors, his son and successor Commodus is remembered as one of the worst.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2002/2002.11871.pdf
for downlink can't they launch a few extra sats that just sit around the Sun and form a big virtual dish (via baseline interferometry or what's that occult DSP magic called these days)?