It's just a question of funding. There's nothing that's needed to accelerate small enough probe on an escape trajectory at a few hundred km/s except plain old chemical rockets with enough stages. If we can accelerate a >500 kg probe to 20 km/s, we can certainly use an extra stage with 400 kg of propellant to boost a 1 kg probe to much higher velocities.

And nobody talked about the next ten years. The GP said "fifty years", which is way too long a time span to have any certainty whatsoever as to what will happen. GP's assertion was 100% ludicrously overconfident.

Just a note: I responded directly to a comment that said it could be built with today's tech, let alone 10, 20, or 50 years.

Ah, yes, it was my own comment :D Sorry for the confusion. What I meant was that bog-standard chemical rockets work just fine for ~100 km/s if the payload mass is low enough and you use enough stages.

But note that "within a decade" I meant "within a decade from launch".