Reducing “launch costs” for ocean tech will unlock the blue economy, the same way the private space sector led to a boom in orbital observation and communications.
If you attend an ocean conference, you’ll likely hear at least one speaker say “We know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the ocean.” In some ways it makes practical sense: for example, electromagnetic radiation (radio waves, light) travels more easily through a vacuum than water, enabling sensing and control at a distance. But in other ways it doesn’t: our lives here on Earth are far more intimately connected to the ocean. The ocean drives everything from the weather around us to the food we eat, and provides trillions of dollars of economic value. So what has prevented us from fully exploring these depths?
In 1960, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard were the first team to reach the Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean where pressures exceed eight tons per square inch. One year later, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin was the first human in space. These events marked similar triumphs of engineering and daring for ocean and space explorers, respectively, but from here the two fields diverged. By the time James Cameron made only the second ever journey to the Challenger Deep in 2012, twelve people had walked on the moon’s surface, and over 600 had been to space.
For the last decades of the 20th century, the cost to launch payload into orbit remained steady at an average of about $20,000/kg, inflation adjusted. Then, from the early 2000s, commercial space flight took off, driving down costs. Soon, SpaceX’s Starship will be able to provide payload costs of less than $200/kg - a 100x decrease. In contrast, the cost to operate a ship at sea actually increased over the same period – primarily due to labor and fuel prices.
This plunge in space launch costs has a number of contributing factors, including the vertical integration enabled by privatization (as opposed to the traditional distributed NASA procurement process) and advances in materials, fuel, and rocket design. The modularization of payloads, such as with CubeSats, provides opportunities for smaller organizations to access seats on an orbital ride, enabling riskier science or testing that may not justify its own launch. Launches have also increased in frequency, doubling in number per year since 2009, and make it more likely that a payload can be taken to exactly where it needs to go on a reasonable timescale.
This revolution in how we access space has enabled a flurry of new orbital activities that were once only accessible to organizations with the budgets of nation-states. Over the past 13 years, McKinsey reports, the space market has grown from $280B to nearly $450B, and could more than double again by 2030. From space tourism to global communications to earth observation, space-based capabilities are now within reach of a well-funded startup. Far future endeavors like asteroid mining or even orbital heavy industry are now being more seriously discussed.
So what lesson does all this hold for the future of ocean tech? When new frontiers are opened, innovation and industry follow. Just as decreasing orbital launch costs have catalyzed an explosion in the space economy, scaled innovations that facilitate access to remote parts of the ocean will supercharge major parts of the blue economy, from fishing and offshore mariculture to energy generation, carbon management, and bioprospecting.
At Propeller, we’re keeping an eye on three major technological trends that will enable ocean access. 1. Autonomy 2. High-bandwidth connectivity and 3. Energy availability.
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1. AUTONOMY
Typically, the most expensive part of deploying any kind of ocean equipment is just getting it out there. For large remotely operated vehicle (ROV) deployments, charter costs for the support ships can be up to $250,000 per day, which often dwarfs the actual rental cost of the deployed equipment. Costs associated with long transit times can then consume up to half the budget of a mission. Crew is the single most expensive part of vessel operation; a large crew necessitates a larger ship to support them, which requires an even larger crew to run, leading to spiraling costs. Technologies that empower limited crews to do more can lead to immediate and dramatic cost savings.
“Until recently, the biggest difference between exploring space and exploring the ocean was that oceanographers continued to use manned craft - ships at sea - to launch these unmanned sensors and devices,” wrote Jyotika Virmani, director of the 2019 Ocean Discovery X-Prize, which sought to develop innovative approaches to deep sea mapping. Recent developments in autonomous or remote operation of seagoing vessels, by both startups and industry incumbents, could significantly decrease the cost of accessing remote areas.
2. CONNECTIVITY
It was like entering the future on the day, nearly 20 years ago, that my family upgraded from dial-up to satellite internet. Until recently, ocean communications has been operating on the equivalent of dialup, making use of cobbled together cellular mesh networks near shore and the occasional few-megabit Iridium uplink at sea. Now, with the advent of Starlink, OneWeb, and others, high-bandwidth connections are available anywhere in the world - even in the middle of the ocean. This has been a game changer in two ways. First, it enables the live collection of massive amounts of previously untapped oceanographic data from buoys and drones, which increases mission efficiency or even removes the need for manned missions altogether. Second, it allows for low latency two-way communication and control of vessels at sea, which facilitates the autonomous operations described above. It’s even becoming possible to extend this connectivity from the surface to the underwater domain, with companies like HydroNet and WSense building “the internet, underwater”.
3. ENERGY
Control and communications don’t mean much without available power to operate. Increases in energy density and decreases in the cost of Li-ion batteries have enabled longer and more complex ocean activities far from the tether of land-based energy sources. Whether operating from shore or from a mothership, battery-driven surface and underwater autonomous vehicles may change how many tasks are handled, just as they have for land-based industries like agriculture and forestry. We’re waiting to see what the equivalent for the ocean will be. Beyond just storage, a plethora of ocean energy-harvesting technologies promise to allow longer, even perpetual at-sea operations, if they can be made scalable and robust to open ocean environments.
Who is driving these innovations forward?
Saildrone, deploying an autonomous wind-driven surface vessel to democratize ocean data, is one of the leaders in decreasing “launch costs” and increasing ocean access; indeed, they were early on described as the “SpaceX of the ocean”, displacing the reigning ocean data provider (NOAA) as SpaceX displaces NASA. Their success in deploying an “ocean data-as-a-service” model demonstrates the appeal of this analogy. Other startups, like Open Ocean Robotics, Seasats, and OceanAero are chasing similar markets with various operating profiles, capabilities, and degrees of capital intensiveness.
Propeller portfolio company Aquatic Labs is reimagining ocean data infrastructure from the seafloor up by developing extremely low cost sensors. While Saildrone takes the Uber Black model for ocean data, providing all-in-one capabilities on demand, and others vie to become the e-bike -- ubiquitous and easy to use -- Aquatic provides the "GPS satellite sensors" that enable more efficient and effective operation through domain awareness. A main value proposition of all these companies is “access”, whether to the inside of a hurricane or to a constant stream of data from across the entire ocean surface.
At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), with which Propeller has partnered to bring innovations from lab to market, scientists and engineers have been working for decades to decrease launch costs and increase access to the ocean for research, conservation, and defense. Harnessing the technological advances described above, they are creating radically affordable ways to reach previously inaccessible areas such as ice-covered seas and the hadal zone (>6000 m, the deepest parts of the ocean). Other researchers at WHOI are developing methods to autonomously deploy and retrieve water samplers for eDNA analysis, which could have enormous implications for fishery management - a $140B global industry - as well as conservation.
The revolution in ocean access is on the horizon and getting bigger. Enabled by recent technological advances and decreases in launch costs, it will catalyze a boom in the blue economy just as we’ve seen in the space industry. If you’re working on a solution to slash ocean launch costs by an order of magnitude or more, Propeller would love to hear from you. Drop us a line or apply for our upcoming Ocean MBA!