DAPRA’s Hydra Program from Federal Business Opportunities
The Hydra program will develop and demonstrate an unmanned undersea system, providing a novel delivery mechanism for insertion of unmanned air and underwater vehicles into operational environments. Situated underwater, Hydra will use modular payloads within a standardized enclosure to enable scalable, cost-effective deployment of rapid response assets and will integrate existing and emerging technologies in new ways to create an alternate means of delivering a variety of payloads close to the point of use. The Hydra program seeks to develop and demonstrate initial examples of air and undersea payloads while leaving open the potential for accommodating additional payloads in the future.
The rising number of ungoverned states, piracy, and proliferation of sophisticated defenses severely stretches current resources and impacts the nation’s ability to conduct special operations and contingency missions. The Hydra program represents a cost effective way to add undersea capacity that can be tailored to support each mission. Hydra’s communications suite could allow synergistic function with manned platforms, thus increasing their effectiveness, or could allow remote control from over-the-horizon. Technologies are intended to be adaptable to multiple delivery options, including airborne, surface, and subsurface. The Hydra program will enable other new capabilities not currently performed from undersea.
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