"Of Course I Still Love You droneship and MS1 have departed from Freeport and are en-route to the Panama Canal!" (Tweet) – via Twitter. ^ CRS-6 First Stage Landing, retrieved 14 March 2021.
The SpaceX drone ship, Of Course, I Still Love You (OCISLY), has arrived in the Panama Canal. It reached its destination ten days and one unforeseen detour after departing Port Canaveral, Florida, for what could be the last time ever.
Of Course I Still Love You was built as a refit of the barge Marmac 304 for landings in the Atlantic Ocean. Its homeport was Port Canaveral, Florida, from December 2015 to June 2021, after being ported for a year at the Port of Jacksonville during most of 2015.
Of Course I Still Love You is unmanned during all landings. Once the landing is complete, Octagrabber will be deployed to secure the booster and SpaceX technicians will dis-engage the thrusters and prepare the droneship for the return journey. The tugboat will then tow OCISLY back to port.
Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) is an autonomous spaceport droneship (ASDS) that is operated out of the Port of Long Beach, California. Of Course I Still Love You was previously based in Florida from 2015 to 2021....Missions.MissionRoleStarlink 4-4ASDSDARTASDSStarlink 2-1ASDSCRS-22ASDS16 more rows
Of Course I Still Love You has a new home port. CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The most prolific SpaceX drone ship has arrived on the West Coast.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX's newest drone ship, "A Shortfall of Gravitas" (ASOG) arrived in port Tuesday (Aug. 31) with its first catch secured to its deck. The booster, dubbed B1061 by SpaceX, launched just two days prior, carrying a cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA.
For those who aren't familiar, Iain M Banks is a famous science fiction author who was the man behind the Culture Series. The naming ceremony didn't stop there as the founder went onto name the second autonomous boat "Of Course I Still Love You".
On 14 January 2017, SpaceX launched Falcon 9 Flight 29 from Vandenberg Air Force Base and landed the first stage on the JRTI, which was located about 370 km (230 mi) downrange in the Pacific Ocean, making it the first successful landing in the Pacific.
A Shortfall of GravitasA new SpaceX drone ship named “A Shortfall of Gravitas” was towed into Port Canaveral Thursday, completing a shuffling of SpaceX's rocket landing platforms to support upcoming launches from Florida and California.
Cape Canaveral'sThe Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a vertical touchdown at Cape Canaveral's Landing Zone 1 about 8.5 minutes after launch. All 59 payloads were deployed into orbit by about 75 minutes after liftoff as planned, SpaceX representatives said.
MS1 — carrying drone ship OCISLY — rushed to the Panama Canal's Atlantic harbor in just five days, practically averaging its top speed with a load, despite several days spent waiting in the Bahamas. OCISLY West Coast voyage progress as of June 20th.
Unlike its twin, the drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI), which did the same journey in reverse roughly a year and a half ago, OCISLY was placed onto the deck of the Mighty Servant 1, a massive semi-submersible transport ship (MS1).
Unlike its twin, the drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI), which did the same journey in reverse roughly a year and a half ago, OCISLY was placed onto the deck of the Mighty Servant 1 , a massive semi-submersible transport ship (MS1). A SpaceX drone ship, while still massive, is a featherweight load in comparison to the ships and oil and gas equipment that often weigh tens of thousands of tons.
If Mighty Servant 1 maintains its outstanding average speed on the final part of its journey, the trek from Panama City to Los Angeles might be completed in under ten days, with an arrival in the first few days of July. After that, SpaceX would have several weeks to inspect the drone ship and prepare it for its maiden West Coast booster retrieval.
MS1 and OCISLY will have roughly 3300 miles (5300 km) to go to Port of Long Beach, the drone ship's new home, once they complete their passage and reach the Pacific. If Mighty Servant 1 maintains its outstanding average speed on the final part of its journey, the trek from Panama City to Los Angeles might be completed in under ten days, with an arrival in the first few days of July. After that, SpaceX would have several weeks to inspect the drone ship and prepare it for its maiden West Coast booster retrieval.
The SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) has arrived in the Panama Canal. It reached its destination ten days and one unforeseen detour after departing Port Canaveral, Florida for what could be the last time ever.
As of Monday, last-minute transit slots were still available for Friday, June 25th, showing that the Panama Canal is not extremely congested. Spaceflight Photojournalist Pauline Acalin shared a photo on her Twitter account and claimed that Long Beach, CA, will soon be welcoming SpaceX's OCISLY.
At the center of the ASDS landing pads is a circle that encloses the SpaceX stylized "X" in an X-marks-the-spot landing point.
SpaceX first launch vehicle landing barge ( Marmac 300 ), and also its third ( Marmac 303 ), were both named Just Read the Instructions ( JRTI ). In fact, some of the parts from the original hull/barge were used to build the Marmac 303 ASDS. The original, Marmac 300, was scrapped after the SpaceX CRS-6 landing failure on 14 April 2015.
The ASDS are a key early operational component in the SpaceX objective to significantly lower the price of space launch services through "full and rapid reusability", and were developed as part of the multi-year reusable rocket development program SpaceX undertook to engineer the technology.
The ASDS are autonomous vessels capable of precision positioning, originally stated to be within 3 m (9.8 ft) even under storm conditions, using GPS position information and four diesel-powered azimuth thrusters. In addition to the autonomous operating mode, the ships may also be telerobotically controlled.
The second ASDS barge, Of Course I Still Love You ( OCISLY ), had been under construction in a Louisiana shipyard since early 2015 using a different hull — Marmac 304 — in order to service launches on the East Coast of the United States. It was built as a replacement for the first Just Read the Instructions and entered operational service for Falcon 9 Flight 19 in late June 2015. As of June 2015, its home port was Port of Jacksonville, Florida, but after December 2015, it was transferred 260 km (160 mi) further south, at Port Canaveral .
In 2018, SpaceX announced plans for a fourth barge, A Shortfall of Gravitas ( ASOG ), to support East Coast operations but the build of the droneship was delayed, and instead JRTI was moved to the East Coast and began operations in June 2020. ASOG was completed in July 2021.
In February 2018, the central core of Falcon Heavy Test Flight exploded near OCISLY, which damaged two of the four thrusters on the drone ship. Two thrusters were removed from the Marmac 303 barge in order to repair OCISLY.
In a last-second change, SpaceX also received shockingly rapid FCC approval to add ten of its own Starlink satellites to the commercial rideshare. If successful, Transporter-1 will thus also mark SpaceX’s first polar launch of operational Starlink satellites. Of the first phase of SpaceX’s ~4400-satellite Starlink constellation, some 520 are expected to be sent to strictly polar orbits
Known as Transporter-1, the mission OCISLY is tasked with supporting is significant for several reasons. Transporter-1 will be SpaceX’s first dedicated rideshare launch under its circa 2019 “Smallsat Rideshare Program” and will likely carry anywhere from 50 to 100+ spacecraft to orbit. More specifically, the mission is headed to a nearly polar sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), technically making it SpaceX and the United States’ second East Coast polar launch in roughly half a century.
SpaceX is in the midst of preparing for back-to-back Falcon 9 launches from its two Florida pads, a feat that will also require two drone ships for each rocket booster to land on.
Altogether, six of SpaceX’s seven recovery ships are currently hard at work supporting two separate Falcon 9 launches – a rare but probably increasingly common sight as SpaceX works to complete as many as 48 launches in 2021. Starlink-16 is scheduled to launch no earlier than 8:23 am EST (13:23 UTC), Tuesday, January 19th ...
GO Quest is currently supporting the Starlink mission tomorrow elsewhere. — Gavin – SpaceXFleet.com (@SpaceXFleet) January 18, 2021. Notably, with drone ship OCISLY and support ship GO Searcher’s recent departure for Transporter-1, SpaceX is in the unique position of having deployed almost the entirety of its substantial rocket recovery fleet.
More specifically, the mission is headed to a nearly polar sun- synchronous orbit ( SSO), technically making it SpaceX and the United States’ second East Coast polar launch in roughly half a century. In a last-second change, SpaceX also received shockingly rapid FCC approval to add ten of its own Starlink satellites to the commercial rideshare.
Drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY), however, departed Port Canaveral heading in almost the exact opposite direction as its sister ship – nearly straight south towards a region southwest of the main island of the Bahamas. Known as Transporter-1, the mission OCISLY is tasked with supporting is significant for several reasons.