Boeing's Monstrous Underwater Robot Can Wander the Ocean for 6 Months

As far as locales go, the bottom of the ocean is a particularly exasperating place to explore. Anyone or anything you send down there has to contend with the dark, with thousands of pounds of pressure on every square inch, with the inability to replenish fuel supplies without returning to the mother ship. In recent years, unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) have improved the situation, eliminating the need to send a human down below, or to attach an unmanned vessel to a surface ship with a long umbilical cord. Those include Boeing's Echo Ranger and Echo Seeker underwater robots, which can spend a few days at at time below the surface, with ranges measured in the tens or hundreds of miles. Those UUV's are "nothing more than an extension, or an application of the surface ship," says Lance Towers, who carries the impressively potent title of director of sea and land at Phantom Works, Boeing's R&D arm.