Here is SpaceX’s new Drone Ship: “A Shortfall of Gravitas”

At this point, SpaceX could claim to be both a rocket company and a shipping company. The company has a fleet of drones with the aim of providing their rockets with a safe place to downshift into the ocean without having to land on land. In the past, they actually had additional ships available for fairing capture, Dragon capsule recovery, and other support efforts. But now the company has welcomed its new drone landing ship with an announcement from Elon Musk on Twitter. Welcome to SpaceX: A lack of Gravitas.

Technically known as the Autonomous Spaceport Drone (ASDS) spacecraft, the A lack of Gravitas will join two other active ASDS (Just read the instructions (II) and Of course i still love you) as well as a retired platform which has also been named Just read the instructions.

The original Just read the instructions launched in 2014 and unfortunately only had two failed landing attempts before being taken out of service. His successor, as well as Of course i still love you took over respectively on the east coast (Port Canaveral) and the west coast (port of Long Beach). A lack of Gravitas will join Just read the instructions to support the company’s operations on the east coast.

Originally announced in 2018, A lack of Gravitas was due to launch in mid-2019. However, it was delayed a bit before it was finally completed this month. It’s actually an improvement over its siblings in that it won’t require a tug to reach the rocket landing zone.

It will have a lot more to do, however – after some initial hiccups due to technical difficulties, the other two drones have racked up an impressive number of successful landings, with 39 successes and 6 failures for Of course i still love you and 17 successes and 1 failure for the Just read the instructions (II). Indeed, the last 14 remote landing attempts on an ASDS have been successful, including three in June 2021.

A lack of Gravitas has yet to build such a balance sheet, but the underlying engineering should be the same. And despite the different and somewhat whimsical names of the ships, they all have another underlying connection to them as well. They are all named after sentient spaceships in Iain M. Bank’s Culture series of science fiction novels. The boat A lack of Gravitas is named after is actually called Knowing a significant lack of Gravitas, and comes from the book Look to the wind. Of course i still love you and Just read the instructions on the other hand come from a book entitled The game player.

Given Mr. Musk’s well-known aversion to sentient AI, the ASDS probably won’t take on their namesake’s personality anytime soon, as in the novels themselves the ships are described as very interesting. But they don’t need to have the same level of sensitivity to do their current job well. Let’s hope that A lack of Gravitas will live up to the success records of its predecessor.

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Main picture:
A lack of Gravitas is officially launched as SpaceX’s newest autonomous spaceport drone spacecraft.
Credit – SpaceX