An autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) is a modified ocean-going barge equipped with propulsion systems to maintain precise position and a large landing platform.

In 2009, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk articulated ambitions for "creating a paradigm shift in the traditional approach for reusing rocket hardware".

[1] In October 2014, SpaceX announced that they had contracted with a Louisiana shipyard to build a floating landing platform for reusable orbital launch vehicles.

[2][3] On 22 November 2014, Musk released a photograph of the "autonomous spaceport drone ship" along with additional details of its construction and size.

[1][4] As of December 2014, the first drone ship used, the McDonough Marine Service's Marmac 300 barge, was based in Jacksonville, Florida, at the northern tip of the JAXPORT Cruise Terminal, where SpaceX built a stand to secure the Falcon stage during post-landing operations.

Tasks such as removing or folding back the landing legs prior to placing the stage in a horizontal position for trucking would have been undertaken while the booster was on the stand.

[11] The ship underwent a major refit in September 2019 to May 2020, initially in Louisiana, and finishing at Port Canaveral, including four new, much larger, positioning thrusters.

[26][27] SpaceX announced that the Marmac 303 would be the second ASDS to be named Just Read the Instructions in January 2016, shortly before its first use as a landing platform for Falcon 9 Flight 21.

[28] On 17 January 2016, JRTI was put to first use in an attempt to recover a Falcon 9 first-stage booster from the Jason-3 mission from Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 4.

[citation needed] A fourth ASDS, A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG), was announced in February 2018 and was originally planned to enter service in mid-2019.

[36] On 9 July 2021, Elon Musk tweeted aerial footage of the completed drone ship in the Gulf of Mexico while undergoing its first sea-trials.

[1][48] SpaceX equips the ships with a variety of sensor and measurement technology to gather data on the booster returns and landing attempts, including commercial off the shelf GoPro cameras.

Of Course I Still Love You worked successfully as a landing platform after the Falcon 9 rocket brought astronauts to space on the crewed mission Demo-2 on 30 May 2020.

[citation needed] In June 2021, OCISLY was transported to the Port of Long Beach to begin supporting launches on the west coast.

[54] After several months of additional work, including installation of new thrusters, Just Read the Instructions went back into service in June 2020 with booster recovery from Starlink v1.0 L7 mission.

[55] The fourth ASDS, named A Shortfall of Gravitas,[56] is registered as 1240683 with MMSI 368219910 and was mentioned by SpaceX in February 2018[citation needed] and again in October 2020 to help support East Coast launches.

[57] A Shortfall of Gravitas underwent its first sea trials on 9 July 2021, and a short video of the ship underway was shared on Twitter by Elon Musk.

[62] In June 2017, OCISLY started being deployed with a robot that drives under the rocket and grabs onto the hold-down clamps located on the outside of the Falcon 9's structure after landing.