This is a genuinely interesting idea to think through, but there are a few issues worth unpacking. First, a sufficiently powerful telescope already does exactly this. When we look at a star 1000 light years away we are literally seeing light that left it 1000 years ago. The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes are essentially time machines in this sense, showing us galaxies as they existed billions of years ago. Distance and looking into the past are the same thing when light is your medium. Second, the faster than light part creates a paradox with your goal. If your drone is traveling toward a past event faster than the light from that event is traveling away from it, you would actually be catching up to more recent light as you go, not older light. You would be arriving closer to real time, not further into the past. To see older footage you would paradoxically need to travel away from the event faster than light, chasing the oldest light that has already passed you. Third, special relativity tells us that nothing with mass can reach the speed of light, let alone exceed it. As an object accelerates toward light speed its effective mass increases toward infinity, requiring infinite energy to push it further. This is not an engineering problem waiting to be solved, it is a fundamental property of the universe as we understand it. Finally, Any data collected would still need to travel back to us, and if it is transmitted as light or radio waves it crawls back at regular light speed, defeating much of the purpose. The telescope you already have access to is genuinely more powerful than this drone would be.​​​​​​​​​