Submarine Launched Drone

A US Navy customer was failing with their internally development system that was designed to launch an air drone from a submerged submarine. I convinced the customer to provide some seed R&D money to develop a proof-of-concept launcher model to solve his challenge. After a successful test additional funding was provided to further develop the product in a joint venture with AeroVironment. Additional successful field testing was performed by sailors. The R&D funding totaled approximately $2M.

After multiple successful tests we successfully lobbied the Navy and the Pentagon to fund this project as a program-of-record in the Presidential Budget. The launcher design is now a sole source acquisition during low rate initial production for $2M. The full rate production contract will provide 10-20 years of production at $5M per year.