I am thinking about a probe reporting back (from inside of a black hole), so I do not need to go in orbit.
how would you get a signal out of the black hole? I dont know anything about space or physics, but wouldnt it be akin to trying to wring out a towel, eg the "information" would just sort of puddle up around the antenna?
Didn't read much of Hawkin's new theory (new as in just a month of less ago), but information can come out of black holes in what he calls "super translations", but it's so scrambled that you couldn't make sense of it.
The analogy I did read was taking a car through a crusher, then an industrial shredder, a wood chipper and finally through a coffee grinder. You'll end up with all of the particles but the information on how to put it together would be long lost.
Edit: of course, someone will come out with the math to get that data back to coherent form, in the future, but not possible right now.