SpaceX's New Recovery Drone Revealed

Recovery drone Of Course I Still Love You, OCISLY, arrived in Long Beach California on the 6th as commented about here before.  Another comment in that article is that the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station/Kennedy Space Center keeps a much higher pace of operations than Vandenberg on the west coast, and SpaceX needed another recovery drone ship.  I had read that SpaceX had another drone ship called A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) that was being finished, but after reading SpaceXFleet.com, I was influenced to say:

It appears that ASOG is being built in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, but isn't remotely close to being ready to travel to Florida.  Gavin Cornwell of SpaceXFleet Tweets that we're nearing three years since the work on ASOG was announced.

This week, video of the new drone ship ASOG was released.  That's a 30 second clip of a test run off the gulf coast before leaving for Florida.  

ASOG looks rather different from OCISLY.  (Note the Octagrabber under the booster helping to hold it to the deck).  ASOG's deck has some taper on both the forward and aft ends, and the body of the barge appears narrower; on OCISLY, the deck doesn't extend beyond the hull while it does on ASOG. 

It's a bit difficult to see that ASOG's deck is shorter than OCISLY, but it does look a bit narrower.  The major difference, though, is all that ... stuff ... on both ends of OCISLY (I don't know which end is bow and which is stern), while ASOG has nothing visible above deck.  The stern of ASOG has a large covered area which is presumably covering some of the infrastructure that's on OCISLY.  There's a smaller cover on ASOG's bow. 

As anyone who has seen their video on how not to land a spaceship can attest, they used to pretty regularly smash a booster into the bow or stern of both OCISLY and sister ship Just Read The Instructions.  Some of the changes might be an indication that they think they can get by with less area.  I have to admit, it's a rare landing that has more than a little protrusion of one foot beyond the big ring on deck.  It has apparently become easy to land a booster on a figurative postage stamp floating 400 miles from the nearest land.

Eric Ralph at Teslarati takes those observations and makes an interesting extrapolation:

That design decision could be connected to Musk’s indication that ASOG is SpaceX’s first truly autonomous drone ship. While JRTI and OCISLY are both capable of autonomously staying in one specific location after being towed out to sea and prepared by a team of technicians, ASOG may be able to travel several hundred miles out to sea, recover and secure a Falcon booster with its Octagrabber robot, and then return to Port Canaveral to offload the rocket without a single person boarding the drone ship.

In theory, if realized, drone ship ASOG’s full autonomy could easily save SpaceX $1M or more per booster recovery. Still, it remains to be seen if SpaceX is actually at a point where at-sea booster recovery can be truly automated as described above. A Shortfall of Gravitas is currently on track to arrive at Port Canaveral on Thursday evening, July 15th.