Palmer Luckey's Anduril Industries is building autonomous submarines to revive U.S. shipbuilding. The DiveLD, a small unmanned sub with sonar and mapping sensors, will scale from 12 to 200 units per year at a new Rhode Island facility. The company sees drone subs as the answer to America's inability to build traditional ships.
That unquestionably phallic thing dangling before you is not meant to be in the air. It's meant to swim. It's the DiveLD autonomous undersea vehicle from Anduril. In other words, it's a robot submarine. And we shall see it do its thing in the water soon enough.
Anduril—
Anduril—
Anduril—
Anduril Industries, in case you haven't heard, is a defense technology company started by this guy. Andrell Palmer Luckey. He's the Oculus headset inventing, mullet sporting, rather eccentric dude. Do you think that NATO should be armed with squirt guns? How about sternly worded letters? Would you like that? Who is out to make a full arsenal of autonomous weapons for the US and its allies. Andrell has drones and planes and weapon systems and fancy software to tie all of this stuff together. And then it has these subs. There's the Dive LD, which is smaller and for looking at and listening to things happening in the ocean. And then there's the Dive XL, which is a real fatty and does stuff we can't talk much about. Anyway, let's get into it. I'm in Quincy, Massachusetts. Oh yeah, out in Quincy. You pronounce it like that. Even though it's spelled like this, because it's Massachusetts, and people here want to be made fun of forever. It's a boat we can't build anymore. Quincy is just outside of Boston and has been an industrial hub for hundreds of years. Last century, this was a lively shipbuilding center. But as you can see by this ancient sub, those glory days are gone. Perhaps you know this already, but the US can barely make ships now. Which brings us back to Anduril. It wants the US to make ships again, only super modern ones without humans inside. And that brings us to James here.
Welcome aboard the Encourager.
The Encourager?
This is the Encourager.
He helps run Anduril's submarine division and used to work at Dive Technologies.
Dive Technologies was the precursor to Anduril's maritime footprint. Since early 2022, Following our acquisition by Anduril, we've been working to rapidly ruggedize the sort of original concept of the DiveLD.
Today, James and I are on a mission. Yes, we have boarded the Encourager, helmed by Captain Jarrett and this load of seamen, to put the DiveLD to the test.
We got about an hour 20-ish steam out. This is our Quincy Basin where we keep all our assets. Today we're actually gonna be doing a survey zone just southeast of Mass Bay.
What are these made out of, these panels?
These panels that we're looking at today are actually a reinforced composite. If we peeled the panels off, you would see small tubes inside this vehicle to protect the electronics, the computers that need to stay dry. But everything else inside the vehicle is flooded with water.
So a normal submarine, obviously you're trying to keep totally sealed.
Everything's got to stay dry. People inside, they like to stay dry.
This just seals the important stuff. Exactly. Yeah. And these are made in Quincy.
These are.
And then they will be made in Rhode Island.
That's right. So we just cut the ribbon on what will be a 150,000-square-foot facility in Quonset Point, Rhode Island. We will have the capacity in that factory to build up to 200 Dive LDs per year.
Okay.
Which compared to our current rate, which is closer to 12 Dive LDs per year, is a pretty significant step change.
Yeah.
This vehicle is configured with what we call a geophysical inspection suite. And there are actually 5 payloads that this vehicle carries. Just below where the break in the panel here is, this is a sensor that we call a side-scanning sonar. Side-scan sonar is essentially capable of producing acoustic imagery of the seafloor that looks to your eye like a photograph.
Okay.
So let's say you want to find an undersea cable. The type of sensor that you would use to actually locate the object of interest is going to be something like a side-scan sonar. The other sensor that's associated with that is an instrument we call a sub-bottom profiler. So let's say the mud turns into gravel, then turns into rock. You'll actually see where those transitions happen.
But are there more sensors, James?
The next sensor we carry is a multibeam echosounder that is used primarily for mapping.
Go on, James. Keep telling me about your sensors.
Two more sensors on this vehicle. One is a magnetometer, almost like a metal detector. The very last sensor is a camera. We also do take real pictures. We're going to pick up the speed a little bit, so—
We're ready to send her on the survey mission. Okay. She's going to go down. It's on the order of 400 centimeters an hour.
Okay. So it's going to dive down?
It is, yep. She goes now, so it picks up some speed, and she's under.
It's like James Bond.
It's kind of spooky out there.
It is spooky, man.
Yeah.
So the vehicle is on mission now, which typically means we can't see what it's doing, except what we do have is our user interface. This is the Lattice screen.
Lattice is one of Anduril's crown jewels. It's the software that lets people track what all of the company's autonomous systems are doing out in the world. It has map info, diagnostics on the hardware, and tools to conduct missions.
In this data field, you can see basic information that tells us what it's doing in an instant in time. If you look over here, you can see basically the vehicle is currently running at 20 meters altitude off the bottom. It's about 60 feet. The vehicle's actually just made a turn. So we completed one track up this box. You can see the vehicle swinging around, coming back.
This rectangle, that's where you want it to stay?
That's the bounds of the survey box that we're running right now. The other neat thing about Lattice, all of our engineers all the software developers, they can follow along and they can keep track of what the vehicle is doing.
We're just the labor.
We're just the labor today. Sorry.
It's going to come back up. Oh, there she is. There she blows. I had no choice. Forward, forward, forward.
Battery set.
Guys, lower it down and hook it.
A few moments later.
All right, what we were doing was operating over a known feature, and if you look closely at what's in this image, you can sort of make out what appears to be some rocks sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor. That's exactly what they are. This is an area that we've mapped many times, and so what we're able to do is come back to this exact area if we want to make sure the sensor data has processed this through lattice matches the sensor data that we've collected before. This is the bottom of the ocean, right? So you're kind of looking at a picture that's been taken of the bottom of the ocean, but it's been taken with acoustic energy. And you can see in this piece of the image, we actually have two objects that are on the seafloor. They look to be old anchors, old ship anchors that have been deposited on the seafloor. So the value to data like this is you could say, hey, maybe something is new that didn't used to be there. Or there's an object in the area that I want to go investigate, and you'll know exactly where it is. And you can go back to that spot. You can take a closer look at it if you need to. You can move or recover the object.
Along with the sub we've been hanging with, Andrel also has this big boy, the Dive XL. It can do longer missions, hold more stuff, and it's been developed alongside the Royal Australian Navy to make what the Aussies call Ghost Shark. The US is in desperate need of learning how to make maritime hardware again. China builds 200 boats for every one the US makes, which should make you sleep easy at night. I should mention, we paid for this episode with our Brex Brex Brex Brex card. Up next, we'll make the totally natural transition from weapons systems to going to see human brains in vats. Ashlee Vance in New Haven.
