One good thing about submarines is this – they can be silent predators of the sea, moving around from coast to coast while carrying a whole lot of nuclear firepower, making it a potential threat to any enemy country. Well, it seems that the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) with funding from SwampWorks at the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Department of Defense Rapid Reaction Technology Office (DoD/RRTO) has managed to put all of that money to good use by introducing an all-electric, fuel cell-powered, unmanned aerial system (UAS) which can be launched from a submerged submarine.
One would wonder now, will Amazon eventually muster up enough money to purchase a submarine so that they can deliver your package to you from a drone that has been fired from the submarine to make the Amazon Prime Air program all the more glitzy? That’s a crazy though that will most probably not happen for sure, but this UAS has taken under half a dozen years of work before results were produced. Launched vertically from a ‘Sea Robin’ launch vehicle, the folding wing UAS will autonomously deploys its X-wing airfoil once it has achieved a marginal altitude, before it assumes horizontal flight configuration. Let us see it put to good use on the battlefield now! [Press Release]