Of Course I Still Love You: The Delightfully Silly Names of SpaceX’s Fleet

Posted on by The Star Queen

Hello, stargazers! I have a confession. Rockets are great, but some of my favorite SpaceX hardware never leaves the planet. It floats. Somewhere out on the Atlantic or the Pacific right now, a flat steel barge with a ridiculous name is waiting for a 15-story rocket booster to come down out of the sky and land on its deck. If that doesn’t make you grin, I don’t know what will.

So let’s take a tour of SpaceX’s navy: the droneships, the support ships, the old fairing catchers, and the brand-new Starship barge. Along the way, we’ll find out where those names came from.

The Droneships and Their Science-Fiction Names

SpaceX calls its landing barges “autonomous spaceport drone ships,” or ASDS. They’re modified ocean barges that use thrusters to hold their position at sea while a Falcon 9 first stage lands on them. Landing at sea saves fuel compared with flying back to land, and it has become SpaceX’s most common recovery method.

In January 2015, Elon Musk revealed the names: the first droneship would be Just Read the Instructions, with a sister ship called Of Course I Still Love You. A third, A Shortfall of Gravitas, was announced in 2018 and entered service in 2021.

Here’s the full roster as of today, November 1, 2026:

  • Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) is based at the Port of Long Beach, California, and catches boosters from Vandenberg. It’s the veteran of the fleet. It caught the first successful droneship landing on April 8, 2016 (CRS-8), and the booster from the historic Crew Dragon Demo-2 launch on May 30, 2020. It moved to the West Coast in 2021.
  • A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) works out of Port Canaveral, Florida, and supports Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches from the Space Coast.
  • Just Read the Instructions (JRTI) is a bit of a ship of Theseus. The first JRTI was badly damaged in a 2015 landing attempt and retired. The name went to a new barge that served on both coasts. In April 2026, SpaceX moved JRTI off Falcon 9 duty and reassigned it to support Starship operations. Its last Falcon booster was the GPS III-10 mission on April 21, 2026.

I’ll confess something right here: Of Course I Still Love You is my favorite droneship, hands down. I own an OCISLY t-shirt, an OCISLY mousepad, and yes, an OCISLY coaster under my coffee cup as I type this. I know, I know, I’m a little weird. I literally watch every single launch until the booster lands safely on the droneship or the landing zone, and every time one settles onto that deck, I cheer like it’s family. Total space nerd, and proud of it.

Where the Names Come From: Iain M. Banks’ Culture

Here’s my favorite part. All three names come from the Culture novels by Scottish author Iain M. Banks, which are some of the most beloved science fiction ever written. The Culture is a post-scarcity civilization run largely by enormously intelligent starships, and those Minds choose their own names. They tend to be hilarious, sarcastic, or oddly poetic. Think So Much For Subtlety or Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall.

  • Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You are ship names from The Player of Games (1988).
  • A Shortfall of Gravitas is a riff on the Culture ship Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall, which appears in Look to Windward (2000) and gets another mention in Matter (2008). It’s part of a running “Gravitas” joke in the series.

Musk has often said he’s a Culture fan, and naming the droneships this way is a lovely tribute to Banks, who died in 2013. Picture a 230-foot rocket booster coming down onto a barge that, in a sense, is telling it “Of course I still love you.” That’s pure joy.

The Support Crew: Bob, Doug, Megan, Shannon and Friends

Droneships can’t do it all alone. Tugs tow them to the landing zone, and support ships handle everything from fishing payload fairings out of the ocean to picking up astronauts. SpaceX’s support ships have names that warm my heart:

  • Bob and Doug used to be the offshore supply ships Ingrid and Ella G. SpaceX bought them in 2021 and renamed them for Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the two NASA astronauts who flew Crew Dragon’s first crewed test flight, Demo-2. They work out of Port Canaveral, supporting droneships and recovering fairings. They even carry little fast boats named Maverick and Goose, after the Top Gun characters. Yes, really.
  • Megan started life as GO Searcher and was renamed in 2022 for astronaut Megan McArthur, who flew on Crew-2. Megan recovered Dragon capsules for years. She left Port Canaveral for the last time in June 2025, and SpaceX confirmed her retirement on June 27, 2025.
  • Shannon, formerly GO Navigator, is named for astronaut Shannon Walker of Crew-1. She’s now SpaceX’s main Dragon recovery ship and is based on the West Coast, since Dragon splashdowns have moved to the Pacific off California.
  • GO Beyond is the West Coast workhorse. She joined the fleet in 2023, is based at the Port of Long Beach, and handles fairing recovery and droneship support for Vandenberg launches. For example, she scooped up the fairing halves from the Transporter-13 mission in March 2025.

Remember Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief?

Before SpaceX settled on scooping fairings out of the water, it tried something gloriously over the top: catching them in giant nets stretched over fast boats.

The first net boat was Mr. Steven, named for the father of the CEO of SeaTran, the company that originally owned it. In June 2019, Guice Offshore bought it and renamed it GO Ms. Tree, which is a pun on “mystery.” It made its first successful catch on June 25, 2019, during a Falcon Heavy launch. Its sister ship got an equally punny name: GO Ms. Chief (“mischief”). In July 2020, the two ships caught both halves of a single fairing for the first time.

Net catching turned out to be harder and less economical than simply cleaning and reusing fairings that landed in the water. The last successful net catch was in October 2020. The nets came off, and both ships left Port Canaveral in April 2021. SpaceX even released a little tribute video for them. Farewell, ladies. You were magnificent.

Starship Goes to Sea: Meet “You’ll Thank Me Later”

Now for the newest name, the one a lot of you have been asking me about: “You’ll Thank Me Later.” Some people assume it’s a new droneship, but it isn’t a landing ship at all. It’s a transport barge.

The barge is the Marmac 31, a deck barge roughly 260 by 72 feet that SpaceX modified to carry Starship hardware by sea from Starbase, Texas, to Florida. Starship and Super Heavy are far too big to drive across the country, so they’ll sail, lying horizontally, from Brownsville to the Space Coast. That’s how SpaceX can launch Starship from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral before its Florida factories are fully up and running.

The name has a fun backstory. In September 2025, Musk posted “You’ll thank me later” and confirmed that it referred to SpaceX and a “watership to transport spaceship from Starbase to Cape Canaveral.” SpaceX VP of Launch Kiko Dontchev later used the phrase when he explained the shipping plan. At the end of December 2025, NASASpaceflight’s Julia Bergeron spotted the Marmac 31 at Starbase, and Dontchev confirmed it was a successful trial run. In 2026, the barge got a big curved tent over its deck that makes it look a bit like an ark. Reports in June 2026 described its arrival at Port Canaveral with Starship hardware. Space reporters, including NASASpaceflight, and fleet trackers now call it “You’ll Thank Me Later.” Officially, though, it’s still the Marmac 31. Back in December 2025, Dontchev said it needed “a little work before we put the name on it,” so think of “You’ll Thank Me Later” as the barge’s beloved nickname for now.

JRTI Joins Team Starship

Starship’s sea story has one more chapter. When SpaceX announced in April 2026 that Just Read the Instructions was leaving Falcon 9 duty, it said the droneship would support Starship and work alongside “You’ll Thank Me Later” on transport operations. One of the original Culture-named ships is now helping move the biggest rocket ever built. How perfect is that?

Why I Love This

Rocket science is serious business, but the people doing it clearly haven’t lost their sense of humor. Every time a booster settles onto Of Course I Still Love You, a little piece of Iain M. Banks’ optimistic, funny, wildly imaginative future becomes real. And every time a Starship sails into Port Canaveral under the name “You’ll Thank Me Later”? Well, I think we will.

Which ship name is your favorite? Tell me in the comments. Mine will always be OCISLY. 💫

— The Star Queen

Sources

Image credit — Banner image: Falcon 9 first stage on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You after CRS-8 (April 2016). Photo: SpaceX, CC0 (public domain).

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