Mother ship
Encyclopedia
A mother ship is a vessel or aircraft that carries a smaller vessel or aircraft that operates independently from it. Examples include bombers converted to carry experimental aircraft
Experimental aircraft
An experimental aircraft is an aircraft that has not yet been fully proven in flight. Often, this implies that new aerospace technologies are being tested on the aircraft, though the label is more broad....

 to altitudes where they can conduct their research (such as the B-52 carrying the X-15), or ships that carry small submarines to an area of ocean to be explored (such as the Atlantis II
R/V Atlantis (AGOR-25)
R/V Atlantis is an oceanographic research vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System fleet. It is the host vessel of DSV Alvin...

 carrying the Alvin
DSV Alvin
Alvin is a manned deep-ocean research submersible owned by the United States Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The vehicle was built by General Mills' Electronics Group in the same factory used to manufacture breakfast cereal-producing...

). The mother ship may also recover the smaller craft, or may go its own way after releasing it.

Usage

The term mother ship dates back to the nineteenth century whaling
Whaling
Whaling is the hunting of whales mainly for meat and oil. Its earliest forms date to at least 3000 BC. Various coastal communities have long histories of sustenance whaling and harvesting beached whales...

 trade when small, fast ships were used to chase and kill whales. The dead meat from several boats was then brought back to the larger, slower ship for processing and storage until the return to land. This model enabled a far more efficient method of whaling. Though whaling is much lower-scale than in earlier days, the single large storage ship model is still used extensively by fishermen. Such ships are known today as factory ship
Factory ship
A factory ship, also known as a fish processing vessel, is a large ocean-going vessel with extensive on-board facilities for processing and freezing caught fish...

s.

In many languages, such as Chinese, Finnish and Japanese the word mother ship refers to an aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier
An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations...

; see 母艦 (literally "mother" + "warship").

The mother ship concept was used in moon landings performed in the 1960s. Both the unsuccessful American 1962 Ranger
Ranger program
The Ranger program was a series of unmanned space missions by the United States in the 1960s whose objective was to obtain the first close-up images of the surface of the Moon. The Ranger spacecraft were designed to take images of the lunar surface, returning those images until they were destroyed...

 landers and the successful Soviet 1966 Luna
Luna programme
The Luna programme , occasionally called Lunik or Lunnik, was a series of robotic spacecraft missions sent to the Moon by the Soviet Union between 1959 and 1976. Fifteen were successful, each designed as either an orbiter or lander, and accomplished many firsts in space exploration...

 landers were unmanned spherical capsules ejected at the last moment from mother ships that had carried them to the Moon and crashed onto its surface. In the manned Apollo program, astronauts in the lunar module separated from the command module
Apollo Command/Service Module
The Command/Service Module was one of two spacecraft, along with the Lunar Module, used for the United States Apollo program which landed astronauts on the Moon. It was built for NASA by North American Aviation...

 in lunar orbit, descended to the lunar surface, and returned to dock in a lunar orbit rendezvous
Lunar orbit rendezvous
Lunar orbit rendezvous is a key concept for human landing on the Moon and returning to Earth.In a LOR mission a main spacecraft and a smaller lunar module travel together into lunar orbit. The lunar module then independently descends to the lunar surface. After completion of the mission there, a...

 with the command module once more for a ride home to Earth.

Somalian pirates
Piracy in Somalia
Piracy off the coast of Somalia has been a threat to international shipping since the second phase of the Somali Civil War in the early 21st century...

 use motherships to extend the reach of their attacking speed boats into the Indian Ocean.

The White Knight I and White Knight II
Scaled Composites White Knight Two
The Scaled Composites Model 348 White Knight Two is a jet-powered cargo aircraft which will be used to launch the SpaceShipTwo spacecraft. It is being developed by Scaled Composites as the first stage of Tier 1b, a two-stage to suborbital-space manned launch system...

 aircraft are examples of contemporary mother ships in aviation.

In science fiction and UFOs

The term has achieved prominence in science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 and in UFO
Unidentified flying object
A term originally coined by the military, an unidentified flying object is an unusual apparent anomaly in the sky that is not readily identifiable to the observer as any known object...

 lore, which extend the idea to apply to spaceship
Starship
A starship or interstellar spacecraft is a theoretical spacecraft designed for traveling between the stars, as opposed to a vehicle designed for orbital spaceflight or interplanetary travel....

s serving as the heart of a fleet. The concept of mothership (almost always spelled as a single word) clearly implies that the other ships in the fleet are dependent on the mothership for at least some services. Motherships are essentially the sci-fi equivalent to modern flagship
Flagship
A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, reflecting the custom of its commander, characteristically a flag officer, flying a distinguishing flag...

s. Typically, a mothership will take up station in an area and remain there for long periods, while smaller ships sortie
Sortie
Sortie is a term for deployment or dispatch of one military unit, be it an aircraft, ship, or troops from a strongpoint. The sortie, whether by one or more aircraft or vessels, usually has a specific mission....

 to interesting destinations. Sometimes a mothership is large enough to operate alone, or is so huge that it contains a fleet in its body.

A variant of the term mother ship can be traced to the hundreds of claimed UFO sightings in the U.S. during the summer of 1947, when a woman in Palmdale, California
Palmdale, California
Palmdale is a city located in the center of northern Los Angeles County, California, United States.Palmdale was the first community within the Antelope Valley to incorporate as a city on August 24, 1962; 47 years later, voters approved creating a charter city in November, 2009. Palmdale is...

 was quoted by contemporary press as describing a "mother saucer [with a] bunch of little saucers playing around it." The term was further popularized in UFO lore through the UFO sightings of George Adamski
George Adamski
George Adamski was a Polish-born American citizen who became widely known in ufology circles, and to some degree in popular culture, after he claimed to have photographed ships from other planets, met with friendly Nordic alien "Space Brothers", and to have taken flights with them...

 in the 1950s, who claimed to sometimes see large cigar shaped Venusian
Venusian
Venusian, Venerean or Venerial may refer to:*Of or relating to the planet Venus*Venusians, hypothetical or fictional beings that inhabit the planet Venus...

 motherships out of which flew smaller sized flying saucers.

In video games, motherships are often a source of bonus points or encountered as boss characters. Roles played in a fleet by a mothership may include that of troop or smaller vessel carrier or repair/supply services.

The slogan "I visited the mothership." appears on T-Shirts available for purchase at Apple Headquarters in Cupertino.

See also

  • Aircraft carrier
    Aircraft carrier
    An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations...

  • Factory ship
    Factory ship
    A factory ship, also known as a fish processing vessel, is a large ocean-going vessel with extensive on-board facilities for processing and freezing caught fish...

  • Flight deck
    Flight deck
    The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is the surface from which its aircraft take off and land, essentially a miniature airfield at sea. On smaller naval ships which do not have aviation as a primary mission, the landing area for helicopters and other VTOL aircraft is also referred to as the...

  • Milchkuh (German WWII submarine)
  • Military spacecraft in fiction
  • Composite aircraft
    Composite aircraft
    A composite aircraft is made up of multiple component craft. It takes off and flies initially as a single aircraft, with the components able to separate in flight and continue as independent aircraft.-Design principles:...

  • Parasite aircraft
    Parasite aircraft
    A parasite aircraft is a component of a composite aircraft which is carried, and air launched by, a mother ship aircraft.The first use for parasite aircraft was in 1916, when the British used a Bristol Scout, flying from a Felixstowe Porte Baby, a giant flying boat of its time. This eventually...

  • Starfighter
    Starfighter
    "Starfighter" is a science fiction term used to describe small, fast, usually one-manned craft designed for armed combat .The appearance and use of fictional starfighters is often modeled on fighter aircraft, with little regard for the actual physics of spaceflight...

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