U.S. Navy's Orca UUV design contract won by Lockheed Martin
NewsOctober 30, 2017
ALM BEACH, Fla. U.S. Navy officials selected Lockheed Martin for the design phase of the Navy's Extra Large Unmanned Undersea Vehicle (XLUUV) program. The contract to design the Orca is valued at an estimated $43.2 million.
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.
This long-range autonomous vehicle will perform a variety of missions, enabled by a reconfigurable payload bay. Key attributes include extended vehicle range, autonomy, and persistence. Orca will transit to an area of operation; loiter with the ability to periodically establish communications, deploy payloads, and transit home. A critical benefit of Orca is that Navy personnel launch, recover, operate, and communicate with the vehicle from a home base and are never placed in harm’s way.
Lockheed Martin employees in Palm Beach, Florida, will perform the work on Orca, with additional support from employees at the company’s locations in Manassas, Virginia, Syracuse, New York, and Owego, New York.
