New Horizons is the ~~fastest moving outbound craft~~ launched space craft.. though this also gets to direction of travel. There are faster ones - the Parker S

New Horizons is the ~~fastest moving outbound craft~~ launched space craft.. though this also gets to direction of travel. There are faster ones - the Parker Solar Probe did 690,000 km/h on closest approach to the sun - that's 0.064 c... but for outbound, you've got the Pioneer 10 and 11 (Voyager 2 overtook Pioneer 10 on July 18, 2023), Voyager 1 and 2, and New Horizons. Voyager 1 is 16.9 kps. Voyager 2 is 15.3 kps. New Horizons is 13.6 kps https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28Voyager+1%2C+Voyager+2%2C+New+Horizons%29+velocity+in+kps https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28Voyager+1%2C+Voyager... Related https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/38/ > New Horizons, the spacecraft currently headed out of the Solar System by way of Pluto, is never going to catch up to Voyager—it’s not moving fast enough and it’s headed in the wrong direction. But it could have. The other problem is that Voyagers were on the Grand Tour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program This allowed them to get multiple gravity assists. Voyager 1 is 2.5e10 km away. Lets pretend that we can launch now and get an outbound velocity twice of New Horizons... > On January 19, 2006, New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station by an Atlas V rocket directly into an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory with a speed of about 16.26 km/s (10.10 mi/s; 58,500 km/h; 36,400 mph). It was the fastest (average speed with respect to Earth) human-made object ever launched from Earth. So let's do 32 kps. That's 24 years to get to where it is now. At that time, Voyager 1 will be another 13 billion km further away. --- Ultimately, the problem is that we can't send faster Voyagers because the voyager program used a once in 175 year planetary alignment to go fast.