The Navy doesn’t want robot boat prototypes, so it nixed its existing unmanned surface vehicle program in favor of an already-made-or-being-built strategy. That move rattled industry last week, but it could bring the Navy closer to getting what it says it needs in medium unmanned surface vessels. 

Wargames showed the larger Modular Attack Surface Craft vehicle as having “too short a range (2,500 [nautical miles]) to be useful, and sometimes it was hard to effectively use its 16 missiles before the vessel was destroyed by counter-battery fire,” said Bryan Clark, who leads the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology. But the service’s request for the vehicle “didn’t prioritize range, which ends up being the most important characteristic.”

The Navy canceled the MASC—Modular Attack Surface Craft—program a year after it started and several companies were building vessels in anticipation of an award expected in late 2025. 

But this latest pivot to a marketplace format may give the Navy a chance to pick from existing technologies and allow defense tech companies to show what they can do. The new approach also means the Navy won’t have to buy prototypes and instead can focus on mature technologies, a Navy official told Defense One.

“I think the better approach is for industry to formulate their ideas on Navy MUSV concepts and propose them to the Navy,” which “can assess them through modeling and simulation to identify which systems and use cases are most effective,” Clark said.

The new solicitation for MUSVs tweaks the requirements—such as asking for longer range—and supplants the previous program in favor of a marketplace approach that will serve as a “regular and recurring competitive environment,” the Navy official said via email. 

“Market research suggests that there are many companies capable [of entering] the marketplace, ranging from start-ups to established shipbuilding companies,” the official said. “The Navy is eager to hear from any and all of these competitors. The selected MUSVs will be driven by mission requirements.  We will procure as many MUSVs in different configurations as required to meet Fleet needs.”

But while some defense tech companies Defense One spoke to support the changes, there was also frustration, particularly with the high upfront costs of the new solicitation requiring companies to build or present an autonomous boat that can ultimately handle performance tests—such as avoiding collisions with another vessel sans docking.

When asked about concerns that only companies with major financial backing would be able to compete, the Navy stressed its commitment to fostering competition.  

“The Navy has been engaging with venture capitalists and tech investors for nearly a year, expressing the Navy’s demand signal. Armed with information about the Navy’s needs and requirements, these investors are using that knowledge to expand their portfolios,” the official said, naming the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital as a resource for interested vendors.    

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All about space awareness. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded $2.3 million to Vantor to detect and analyze priority space objects in low Earth orbit in near-real time. The contract for NGA’s Luno B program. The work is already underway and provides automated analysis, which is typically a manual process, and alerts NGA of irregularities. 

• “This is all powered by our non-Earth imaging capability, our NEI…to capture high-resolution imagery in Space. And we can capture images that are under 10-centimeter resolution, and we can capture them from hundreds of kilometers away,” Susanne Hake, who leads Vantor’s government business, told Defense One. “And then we’re able to do automated analysis on those images to help characterize” what the image is. 
• Background: Space domain awareness is becoming increasingly important for the military and intelligence community as competition or “dogfighting” with adversarial nations persist. This is the third Luno win for Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence. No details were provided about the length of the contract. 
• “Our previous task orders,” she said, “are focused on automated change detection on the ground and AI-enabled object detection across air, land, and maritime. So being able to also layer on that space domain, within that Luno construct, I think represents an ability for us to really build out this more complete, multi-domain picture.” 

More space moves. Sierra Space named Jeff Schrader its chief strategy officer, a role where he will focus on the company’s expansion efforts, including mergers and acquisitions. Schrader was previously the vice president of strategy and business development at Lockheed Martin Space. The company also has a new CEO and was recently valued at $8 billion after a $550 million funding round. 

In other space news: This week, Varda Space launched a reentry capsule, its sixth, with experimental payloads as part of an Air Force Research Laboratory project. 

And one more naval thing: L3Harris Technologies is contracted to deliver a torpedo tube launch and eecovery system for an undisclosed amount in an other transaction authority award through the Pentagon’s innovation agency, the Defense Innovation Unit. “Our system is the first to successfully launch and recover AUVs from a submarine, providing commanders flexibility for persistent undersea operations and maintaining essential stealth,” Nino DiCosmo, the company’s president of maritime, space and mission systems, said in a news release. 

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