unmanned

What you can do, is make attack aircraft more numerous, cheaper, and more expendable -- which almost certainly means unmanned.

That's been the case since militaries began testing anti-aircraft weaponry with unmanned aircraft, around World War II.

There are a few examples, the first that comes to mind being the ISS's unmanned supply missions.

Using the same word for unmanned military bombers and (relatively) harmless toys seems a bit counter-productive.

Our business is rapidly expanding in one of the most exciting and technically challenging areas of aerospace: that of unmanned aviation.

Manned planes will fly for several decades still, and even upcoming generations will most likely be optionslly manned rather than unmanned.

The first module of the ISS was launched unmanned, then a Space Shuttle mission met up with it 2 weeks later.

Although, given that rocket launch failure is a fact of life anyway, then putting the LAS on unmanned payloads means you get a much higher chance of testing it for real.

The earlier stages just involve unmanned robots controlled from Earth, beginning with around 17th century technology and moving towards autonomy with each successive generation.

The trouble with unmanned robots which are easily manufactured is that we can't trace who made it, sold it, or launched it.

Nevertheless, it's an interesting prospect to send unmanned missions to Mars carrying habitat elements, before a manned mission, since they can be sent well in advance.

Dragon v1 is unmanned and has no launch abort capability.

Pro tip: Whenever you read "drone" in a news article you can almost always safely replace it with "unmanned aerial vehicle" with no loss of information.

> Pro tip: Whenever you read "drone" in a news article you can almost always safely replace it with "unmanned aerial vehicle" with no loss of information.

"It was the first space shuttle to perform an unmanned flight, including landing in fully automatic mode." "[...] despite a lateral wind speed of 61.2 kilometres per hour (38.0 mph), it landed only 3 metres (9.8 ft) laterally and 10 metres (33 ft) longitudinally from the target mark." That sounds pretty impressive.

Unmanned missions to anywhere in our solar system are doable on smaller budgets.