Elon Musk has responded to a story about the world’s first crewless ship by tweeting a picture of his autonomous drone ship back to the website that published the story.
On Monday, The Verge tweeted a link to their story headlined ‘The world’s first crewless ship will launch next year’, to which the SpaceX founder replied “Umm …” with a picture the crewless ship that he launched called Of Course I Still Love You.
Umm … pic.twitter.com/bjJ0lNYK35
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 31, 2017
The Verge article, with information originally reported in The Wall Street Journal, claims that a Norwegian boat named Yara Birkeland will be launched in 2018 and be fully autonomous by 2020. They say it will use GPS, radar, cameras and sensors to navigate around other ships and dock on its own.
But Musk’s SpaceX has already developed three autonomous ships on which to land its Falcon 9 reusable rocket, according to Foxtrot Alpha. The website reports that these landing ships use GPS to position themselves for the rocket, but can be manoeuvred by remote control.
The last time that Musk’s drone ship successfully landed a rocket was on June 25th when SpaceX landed two Falcon 9 rockets back on Earth in the space of 48 hours, according to The Verge. One of the rockets landed on a drone ship called Just Read the Instructions that was floating in the Pacific Ocean. It was the eighth time that SpaceX has successfully used the autonomous ship.