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So what do you called an unmanned spacecraft? We've got unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and unmanned submersible vehicles (USVs), and and unmanned land vehicle

So what do you called an unmanned spacecraft? We've got unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and unmanned submersible vehicles (USVs), and and unmanned land vehicles (ULVs), are they "unmanned orbital vehicles" (UOVs?) or maybe unmanned rocket vehicles? (URVs?)

ncmncm 7y ago
Satellites. Voyager. Spirit Mars rover.
jvanderbot 7y ago
Most spacecraft are already unmanned. It's redundant.
ahje 7y ago
"Space ship" works. :) It's fairly generic though. If I needed a more specific term for space planes like this, I'd probably go with orbital drone", based on terminology used in various sci-fi franchises.
ohitsdom 7y ago
Since you bring up naming, man/unmanned really needs to be dropped for crewed/uncrewed. NASA technically adopted this in 2006, but they still mess it up. Here's more info on their terminology, as well as other options you brought up: https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/10050900-finding-new-language.html https://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/100509...
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  Thank you for that, pretty much exactly what I was wondering. Presuming "uncrewed" gets added to the dictionary I would expect that to prevail as the antonym for "crewless" might reasonably be "crewful", which also sounds weirder than "uncrewed"/"crewed".