page_title: Autonomous spaceport drone ship
section_title: Of Course I Still Love You
hierarchical_section_title: Autonomous spaceport drone ship / History / The active ASDS fleet / Of Course I Still Love You
caption_attribution_description: English: "Of Course I Still Love You" (Marmac 304) drone ship moving into position for the Sunday, June 28, 2015, SpaceX CRS-7 rocket launch and landing attempt.
context_page_description: An autonomous spaceport drone ship is an ocean-going vessel derived from a deck barge, outfitted with station-keeping engines and a large landing platform and is controlled by an autonomous robot. Construction of such ships was commissioned by aerospace company SpaceX to allow for recovery of rocket first-stages at sea for missions which do not carry enough fuel to return to the launch site after boosting spacecraft onto an orbital or transplanetary trajectory.
  SpaceX has two operational drone ships. Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You, which both operate in the Atlantic for launches from Cape Canaveral. JRtI operated in the Pacific for Vandenberg launches from 2016 to 2019 before leaving the Port of LA in August 2019. As of 2 June 2020, 43 Falcon 9 flights have attempted to land on a drone ship, with 34 of them succeeding.
  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.
context_section_description: 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. 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 Jacksonville, Florida, but after December 2015, it was transferred 160 miles (260 km) further south, at Port Canaveral.
  While the dimensions of the ship are nearly identical to the first ASDS, several enhancements were made including a steel blast wall erected between the aft containers and the landing deck. The ship was in place for a first-stage landing test on the CRS-7 mission, which failed on launch on 28 June 2015.
  On 8 April 2016 the first stage, which launched the Dragon CRS-8 spacecraft, successfully landed for the first time ever on OCISLY, which is also the first ever drone ship landing.
  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.
  On 30 May 2020, the first stage of the Crew Demo-2 mission landed on OCISLY, with the Crew Demo-2 mission marking both the first launch of American astronauts, from American soil, on an American rocket since the final flight of the Space Shuttle in 2011, and the first launch of astronauts aboard a SpaceX rocket. This marked the first time in history that the first stage of a rocket launched a crew into space and then landed itself safely.
caption: SpaceX's Of Course I Still Love You, based on the Marmac 304 ocean-going barge
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