Lockheed Martin has secured a design phase contract valued at $43.2 million for Orca, the US Navy’s Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (XLUUV).
XLUUV Orca is a two phase competition, including the currently awarded design phase and a competitive production phase for up to nine vehicles to meet increasing demands for undersea operational awareness and payload delivery.
The autonomous vehicle can undertake a variety of missions, enabled by a reconfigurable payload bay. Key attributes include extended vehicle range, autonomy, and persistence.
Orca can travel to an area of operation; loiter with the ability to periodically establish communications, deploy payloads, and transit home.
A key feature of Orca is that Navy personnel are able to launch, recover, operate, and communicate with the vehicle from a home base without being placed in harm’s way.
Frank Drennan, Director, Submersibles and Autonomous Systems, Business Development at Lockheed Martin said: “With each new undersea vehicle that Lockheed Martin designs, we bring to bear the state-of-the-art in technology, and innovative system integration of those technologies, to increase the range, reach, and effectiveness of undersea forces and their missions.
“With decades of experience supporting the US Navy’s mission, our engineers are approaching this design with a sense of urgency and continued agility.”
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