Mission | Role |
---|---|
Starlink 4-4 | ASDS |
DART | ASDS |
Starlink 2-1 | ASDS |
CRS-22 | ASDS |
He took a deep breath. The Player of Games book cover. Of Course I Still Love You operates off the coast of Florida in the Atlantic Ocean and is a landing platform for Falcon 9 rockets launched from Launchpad 39-A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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 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.
Then lo and behold Of course, I still love you, and Just Read the Instructions are General Contact Unit ship names. These are taken from Iain M Banks’s Culture series novel The Player of Games. Though Player of the games is the second book in the series you can read it as a standalone.
Port of Long BeachOf Course I Still Love You worked successfully as a landing platform after the Falcon 9 rocket brought astronauts to space on the crewed mission Demo-2 on 30 May 2020. In June 2021, OCISLY was transported to the Port of Long Beach to begin supporting launches on the west coast.
Banks. Late last month, SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO Elon Musk announced that he had named the company's first spaceport drone ship "Just Read the Instructions." The second autonomous boat, which is under construction, will be called "Of Course I Still Love You," Musk added.
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".
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.
A 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.
Name. SpaceX's CEO, Elon Musk, named the spacecraft after the 1963 song "Puff, the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul and Mary, reportedly as a response to critics who considered his spaceflight projects impossible.
Endeavour and its four crew members splashed down in the Atlantic off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, at 1:06 p.m. EDT (1706 GMT) on Monday (April 25). Upon reaching Endeavor's retrieval area, crews aboard the ship hoisted the capsule out of the water using a specialized crane on the vessel's stern.
The exact position of the droneship is dependant on mission requirements. Boosters used on Starlink and geostationary transfer orbit missions typically land between 600 – 675 km downrange. The furthest droneship position was 1239 km downrange, set during the STP-2 Falcon Heavy mission in June 2019.
A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today at 2:35 p.m. EDT (1835 GMT), on a mission called Transporter 5. The 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.
SpaceX set to rattle windows with launch and landing at Cape Canaveral.
A fourth ASDS, A Shortfall of Gravitas, was announced in February 2018 and was originally planned to enter service in mid-2019. In October 2020, Elon Musk re-affirmed plans to build a ship of this name. In January 2021, Marmac 302 was spotted at Bollinger Fourchon site. On 6 April 2021, NASASpaceFlight.com spotted the Octagrabber presumed to be for A Shortfall of Gravitas at the Cidco Road facility in Cocoa Beach, Florida. It may have originated as an upgraded Octagrabber for Just Read The Instructions. By mid April 2021, Marmac 302 had scaffolding to prepare for construction which was confirmed on 9 May 2021. It is expected to join the East Coast fleet in coming months, sending OCISLY to the West Coast, with the first booster recovery being done for a Falcon heavy side booster B1065 used in USSF-44 mission.
Musk reported that the first stage did successfully soft-land on the ship, but a lockout latch on one of the landing legs failed to latch and the first stage fell over, causing a breach of the propellant tanks and a deflagration on impact with the drone ship. Failure.
Okay, so outwardly this one seems pretty tame. Falcons are majestic birds, after all. But wait, there’s more. “Falcon” comes from the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars fame.
If you’re thinking of King Arthur’s wizard buddy, you’re a little off. While this one sounds like it’s straight out of a 13-year-old's D&D game, it’s actually named for another bird.
With another name that sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a fantasy novel, the Dragon capsule and Dragon 2 conjure images of fire-breathing beasts. According to Musk, though, the name is firmly grounded in reality.