Strictly speaking, the voyager missions already are the faster space craft that caught up with another spacecraft - Pioneer 10 and 11. Looks like we lost conta

Strictly speaking, the voyager missions already are the faster space craft that caught up with another spacecraft - Pioneer 10 and 11. Looks like we lost contact with 10 and 11 in 1995 and 2006 respectively. They both ran out of power and shut down. The voyager missions used a rare planetary alignment to get boosts. And a radioisotope thermal engine that has gotten pushback in later spacecraft designs, although they have ceramic versions now meant to address most of the issues. That said, New Horizons, which gave us those lovely shots of Pluto, was launched in 2006. But it is traveling faster than the Pioneers but slower than Voyagers, so it’ll be the third farthest away at some point.