Prototype American Uncrewed Surface Vessel Set For Months-Long Spring Mission

American defence research organisation DARPA has announced that construction work has been completed on USX-1 Defiant, its prototype NOMARS uncrewed surface vessel.

Building work on the 180ft, 240-ton lightship was completed in February, as per a recent press statement by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The NOMARS (No Manning Required Ship) programme’s brief was to design an autonomous endurance uncrewed surface vessel (USV) that was capable of being deployed for long durations at sea.

USX-1 Defiant will now be put through extensive in-water testing at dockside and then subsequently at sea: she is scheduled to begin a multi-month at-sea demonstration mission later this spring.

The DARPA statement noted: “The NOMARS program aims to challenge the traditional naval architecture model, designing a seaframe (the ship without mission systems) from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans on board.

“By removing the human element from all ship-design considerations, the programme intends to demonstrate significant advantages, to include: size, cost, at-sea reliability, greater hydrodynamic efficiency, survivability to sea-state, and survivability to adversary actions through stealth considerations and tampering resistance.”

• You can read more details on the DARPA website