By Brett Davis, Editor-in-Chief
After speaking on a panel about AUKUS, the partnership to build submarines and share technology between the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Connecticut) took to the show floor to celebrate an early technology partnership.
Courtney broke a bottle of “champagne” against the hull of an unmanned surface vessel, the Bluebottle USV from Australia’s Ocius Technology Ltd. The vehicle is equipped with a towed sensor array and related technology from Connecticut-based ThayerMahan (Booth 2039).
That vehicle is the first of six to be delivered from Ocius to ThayerMahan and is now named the ThayerMahan Outpost, TM001, aimed at performing persistent surveillance. (Because the event was on the show floor, the bottle was plastic and not filled with bubbly.)
Outpost can be built and deployed quickly and for less than 1% of the cost and personnel compared with legacy acoustic surveillance platforms, the company said. In fact, the Outpost can usually be operated by just one person sitting before a monitor, said retired Navy Vice Admiral Michael Connor, CEO of the company he founded in 2016.
“We were just having a great conversation about AUKUS Pillar 2, and this is it, in three dimensions,” Courtney said before the christening.
He said Connor, the former commander of U.S. submarine forces who became enthusiastic about unmanned systems before they were mainstream is “a prophet, ahead of his time.”
Kevin Rudd, the Australian ambassador to the United States, said the Outpost is “innovation writ large,” with a “cheap, usable, deployable, flexible, all-purpose platform” equipped with a sail, solar power and the ability to generate power from wave motion.
“This is quite extraordinary, but also it becomes this wide-area surveillance platform for multiple applications, both civilian and military,” Rudd said, later joking that TM001 should be christened with a bottle of Foster’s lager and the use of champagne is “possible un-Australian activity.”
Robert Dane, CEO of Ocius Technology Ltd., said the second platform sold to ThayerMahan, TM002, is already in the country and TM003 is on its way, “and it’s our job to get 4, 5 and 6 here by the end of the financial year, which is June in Australia.”
Dane also described the partnership with ThayerMahan an “AUKUS Pillar 2 success.”
Speaking earlier to Seapower, Connor said, “the thing that we produce is valuable for both countries in that we do wide-area acoustic surveillance for surface ships and submarines for about a penny on the dollar relative to how we do it with ships, aircraft and submarines. The fact that we do it together with an Australian partner is, I think, a very positive aspect of relations between the countries. We bring a best-of-breed sonar and they bring a best-of -breed vehicle.”
He said ThayerMahan had tested is sonar array on virtually every one of the USVs on display at Sea-Air-Space, but “only this one can really handle the size of the array that you need to get the performance.”
