SpaceX Unveils New Sea-Sailing, Booster-Catching Drone Ship To Support Rockets
Image via Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest drone ship, named ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’ (ASoG), was unveiled on founder Elon Musk’s Twitter last week. It will join its colleague, ‘Just Read the Instructions’ (JRtI), on the Atlantic Ocean, and replaces its predecessor ship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ (OCISLY), which has been moved to the west coast.
ASoG is set to be placed off Florida, in preparation to support launches of the Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. These regularly send Starlink broadband satellites to orbit, as well as to the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts and cargo.
The drone ship’s namesake is the ‘Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall’, a fictional spaceship written about by author Iain M Banks. This aligns with the theme that the other two, JRtI and OCISLY, were named. Both were mentioned in Bank’s other novels in the author’s Culture series.
According to a tweet by Musk, it seems that it will work with JRtI to catch and hold the side boosters from the launches, which can be reused in upcoming missions. By landing boosters on the drone ships instead of directing them back to land, SpaceX not only saves fuel, but also increases payload to orbit , Space Explored notes. However, the tweet was sent in 2018, so plans may have changed since then.
Autonomous SpaceX droneship,
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 9, 2021
A Shortfall of Gravitas pic.twitter.com/hNZ5U7nxUg
[via Space, images via Elon Musk]
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