The Future of Autonomous Ships with Blue Water Autonomy’s Austin Gray
Austin Gray is a cofounder and chief strategy officer at Blue Water Autonomy, a defense technology company developing autonomous ship-sized vessels for the U.S. Navy and allied forces.
Austin Gray is a cofounder and chief strategy officer at Blue Water Autonomy, a defense technology company developing autonomous ship-sized vessels for the U.S. Navy and allied forces.
What is Blue Water Autonomy?
We’re building the first truly autonomous ship-sized unmanned vessels for the American industrial base. I’m a Navy intelligence veteran who spent time working in a drone factory in Ukraine. I became obsessed with applying everything happening in Ukraine to the Navy’s force architecture. I love the Navy, but I was worried it was moving too slowly relative to how fast the world is changing.
My hypothesis is that we need unmanned ships and not just the speedboats and sailboats that are already unmanned in the Navy, but actual ship-sized unmanned vessels. We’re now a 40-person company that just raised a Series A led by Google Ventures, and we’re laser-focused on deploying our unmanned ship by the end of next year. We have a 145-ton test vessel operating outside Boston right now.
Why are unmanned surface vessels (USVs) critical to the U.S. arsenal?
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) get most of the media attention, especially after operations like Spiderweb in Ukraine, but USVs solve a different problem. Across all domains — air, sea, undersea, ground — unmanned systems lower the cost of moving a given payload. Ships are expensive. They’re big, require lots of metal and manufacturing, and burn substantial fuel. If we can have smaller platforms carrying the same payloads, that’s really important.
Many companies are making great strides in the small USV space because those are relatively easy to assemble. What we’re focused on at Blue Water is bringing the first truly autonomous ship-sized unmanned capability to the American industrial base. The Navy’s program of record, called MUSV, focuses on carrying missiles and doing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. But these vessels can handle all kinds of dull, dangerous and dirty work from logistics to persistent surveillance, and yes, kinetic operations too.
How does Blue Water’s approach differ from competitors like Saronic and Saildrone?
The renewably powered vessels like Saildrone can go anywhere, but their speed is 3 knots and they can’t power large payloads like radars. They’re excellent for slow and low-power passive sensors, but they can’t move the big payloads the Navy is built around.
The speedboats that companies like Saronic make are fantastic for a couple hundred miles and maybe a day or two of operations. But a couple hundred miles is a blink in the Pacific. Even nuclear-powered ships take forever to cross it. The speedboats also can’t carry the thousands of pounds of payload space or hundreds of kilowatts of payload power that the Navy needs.
You need a ship-sized form factor. The ship we’re building is much smaller and cheaper than a destroyer, but it’s not a toy boat. It can carry the radars, missiles, secure communications and other systems the Navy requires.
What’s your strategy for mass-producing these vessels?
My co-founder Scott has tremendous manufacturing experience. He was part of the team that built the first Roomba, then went to China to set up the factory that built the next 4 million units. He drove the bill of materials from hundreds of dollars down to well below $100.
We can’t achieve those same economics with a ship since this isn’t consumer electronics. But we’re thinking carefully about what the American industrial base can already build. We’re using a steel design, not some exotic composite or aluminum. There are far fewer aluminum welders, the work is less forgiving, can only be done in certain weather conditions, and the labor is more expensive.
There are about 40 shipyards in the U.S. that can produce a vessel like ours. We’re trying to harness the existing power of the American industrial base rather than requiring specialized capabilities.
How has the Navy responded to your approach?
The Navy has been a great partner. They get criticized as the hardest service to work with, and I understand why that reputation exists. But the group we’re working with — PMS 406 under NAVSEA — is running with a DIU-style playbook to acquire ships like tech products. They’re using non-FAR acquisition and moving very fast. They did an industry day over the summer, have already made down-selections, and say they’re going to award contracts around Christmas. That’s fast.
The feedback I’ve gotten over the last two years, starting when I was still in Ukraine making exploratory calls, has given us the confidence to raise money, scope our first product, and hire the team to execute this.
What are the biggest technical challenges in building autonomous ships?
The biggest challenge is that so much of ship architecture is built around crew safety standards and crew design choices. We’ve had to redesign a ship from the keel up to make it fully autonomous. You can’t have an engine shutoff valve that’s literally a manual wheel like you’d use to turn off water in your basement. That doesn’t work for software control.
We’ve had to ensure our software can control every single piece of machinery on the ship. In many cases, the original equipment manufacturers don’t have modern interfaces for software because they’re used to crewed ships. It comes down to vendor selection and finding partners who get as excited as we do about inventing the future.
What’s the vision for Blue Water over the next decade?
In the next one to three years, we’re competing for a program of record. By the end of next year, we’ll have our first ship at sea. I want to have ships in the fleet by 2027.
Looking five to 10 years out, we want to be the company that makes ships autonomous for the fleets of allied navies and the commercial industry. We want to be the SpaceX of the sea by disaggregating the architecture and creating smaller, cheaper platforms that are truly ocean-going. Not just littoral coastal patrol vessels, but blue water capabilities that can handle commercial logistics and other dull, dangerous and dirty missions. Ocean-going labor is expensive. It’s about 40 percent of the operating cost of small ships in places like Alaska and Hawaii.
How do you define deep tech?
Deep tech is technology where you have to go back to first principles and build some enabling technology before you get to applying and assembling things. Just assembling and integrating existing tech isn’t deep tech.
At Blue Water, we’re building core enabling technology — that’s the deep tech portion — and then we’re assembling and integrating everything full stack together as well. We’re not just putting together off-the-shelf components; we’re creating fundamental new capabilities that didn’t exist before.
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