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Boeing Co. recently signed a $43 million contract from the US Navy to develop a fleet of massive drone submarines called Orca Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs). Boeing and the US Navy haven’t disclosed any details of the size of the submarines. However, the design of these unmanned submarines would be based on their previously developed underwater drone prototype Echo Voyager unmanned sub. Major work will be carried out in Boeing’s Huntington Beach facility, and the drones are expected to be completed by 2022.

The Echo Voyager is a 51-foot-long drone submarine that can achieve a range of roughly 6,500 nautical miles and is built to incorporate a modular payload section, which will allow it to take on a variety of different missions. According to Boeing, it can ‘perform at sea for months at a time,’ and does not require launch or recovery by a support vehicle and runs on a hybrid system that combines battery and marine diesel.

Source: Boeing

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank in Washington, D.C, said, “What it shows is that the Navy is willing to start putting some real money behind the acquisition of unmanned undersea vehicles. This is the first time the Navy has put significant money down on UUV (unmanned underwater vehicles) that have a military, war-fighting capability.”

Margaret E. Kosal, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology said, “Analysts say undersea drones could be used for missions once conducted by crewed submarines, while the lack of a crew gives the drones an advantage in conducting “persistent surveillance for activities that might take place in an area where there is concern about underwater mines.”

Clark also added that developing undersea drones comes with added technical challenges which are not experienced by aerial counterparts. Rosa Zheng, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Lehigh University explains that water is a much thicker medium. This actually makes real-time communication more difficult than sending transmissions through air.

Scott Savitz, a senior engineer at the Rand Corp. think tank, said that “unlike an aerial drone, which can access satellite communications to gain its bearings and show what it sees in real time to a human operator thousands of miles away, an underwater drone loses access to the electromagnetic spectrum once it is below the waterline.”

It was just last month that Boeing’s safety analysis procedure was questioned as authorities around the world — including the U.S., Europe, China, and Indonesia — grounded Boeing 737 Max planes being subject to two fatal crashes in less than six months involving the same plane model. And Boeing taking up this project, people are skeptical of what the consequences would be.

To know more about this announcement in detail, head over to U.S Naval Institute’s official blogpost.

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