Interestinghttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-14/boeing-s-large-underwater-navy-drone-sees-three-year-delay?
The hulking underwater drones that Boeing is manufacturing jointly with shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries Inc. build on decades of cutting-edge research into manned and unmanned submarines by Boeing as well as defense programs that it acquired from Rockwell International Inc. in 1996.
The Orca is based on Boeing’s 50-ton Echo Voyager, an experimental drone that was designed to cruise underwater for months at depths of as much as 11,000 feet (3,400 meters) on anti-submarine, mine-sweeping and other missions.
Orca is the largest of several classes of unmanned underwater surface and surface vessels that Navy officials were developing in the Trump administration’s final years in the effort to boost the service’s total inventory from 298 deployable vessels today to as many as 355 by 2030. The Biden administration hasn’t endorsed the Trump number nor proposed a new goal. But the Navy continues to see value in unmanned vessels, as outlined in a March 2021 framework. The service’s shipbuilding plan has budgeted more than $4 billion through 2027 on pilotless systems.