droneship

plural droneships

1. A ship that can operate autonomously or telerobotically, like a drone, without a crew onboard.

   2015, Alan Yuhas, The Guardian, 14 April 2015, SpaceX fails in third attempt to land reusable Falcon 9 rocket on barge, Rocket landed on droneship, but too hard for survival […]

   3 more examples

   SpaceX also attempted droneship rocket landings several times in 2015 in the Atlantic Ocean, but was unsuccessful. […]

   2016, Video Shows SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Land on Droneship, Then Fall Over and Explode, Space.com, 18 January 2016

   In the very early hours of Friday morning, a high-velocity Falcon 9 rocket landed successfully on a SpaceX droneship in the Atlantic, making history as the first such mission to do so.[…]

   2016 May 6, Nick Lucchesi, It Took SpaceX These 6 Times to Perfect a Droneship Landing, Inverse: Life in Space

   […] the rocket then returned to Earth and landed on a remotely piloted platform, known as a droneship […]

   2017 March 31, Jackie Wattles, “SpaceX makes history: it launched a used rocket and then landed it in the ocean”, in CNN, archived from the original on 30 Sep 2017