AUSTIN, Texas — The U.S. Navy has awarded Saronic Technologies a firm-fixed-price production Other Transaction award for Marauder, its 180-foot autonomous surface vessel, under the service’s Medium Unmanned Surface Vessel (MUSV) Marketplace. Saronic announced the award on 30 September, following an at-sea evaluation in which Marauder ran eight consecutive days of 24/7 operations and completed more than 140 test scenarios without a failure. Neither Saronic nor the Navy disclosed the contract value.
Why it matters
The MUSV Marketplace is the Navy’s attempt to buy medium uncrewed vessels from designs that already exist rather than fund a multi-year development program. The award is executed under 10 U.S.C. § 4022(f), the other-transaction authority that lets the service go straight from a successful prototype evaluation to production without a new competition. Saronic was one of seven companies downselected to at-sea testing in June 2026.
The vessel Saronic put through those trials is a logistics-scale hull, not a strike boat. Published figures give it a 12-knot cruise and a 25-knot-plus sprint, with 5,400 nautical miles of range at a 25-tonne base load and 4,100 nm carrying its 150-tonne maximum — four 40-foot ISO containers, eight 20-foot, or modular payloads in the same space.
The detail worth noting from the evaluation is how Marauder found other ships. Saronic says the testing emphasised passive perception: detecting, classifying and tracking vessels on onboard passive sensors alone, with no active radar emissions. For a hull designed to operate for weeks without a crew, not broadcasting its own position is a capability, not a limitation — and it is the part of the test that is hardest to fake with a demonstration run.
“Marauder went from initial design to on-the-water in under a year, and this evaluation demonstrated that the platform holds up under the Navy’s own toughest testing.”
Dino Mavrookas, CEO and co-founder, Saronic Technologies
Marauder is the large end of a range that starts with the 24-foot Corsair, already under a separate Navy production contract. Saronic is also building Landing Craft Utility hulls for the Navy at Port Alpha, the shipyard it is standing up in Brownsville, Texas, and in September selected the Port of Gulfport, Mississippi, as its on-water test site for Marauder.
Leave a Reply