America's path to maritime leadership is clear - but it demands urgency

"I didn't set out to build boats. My career began in high-energy physics, searching for the hidden patterns of the universe. I then transitioned to aerospace, working on autonomous aircraft at NASA. At MIT, I turned my attention underwater, developing drones that combined guidance, sensor fusion, and autonomy to probe the hostile interiors of nuclear reactors. Looking back, the through line was learning to understand unseen systems and building machines that could navigate them."

"Then, in 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished. I followed the search closely, and it left me unsettled. In an age when we could locate a smartphone in seconds, how could a modern jetliner simply disappear into the ocean? It was a reminder that the world's largest geographic frontier remained the least mapped, the least digitized, and perhaps the least understood."

"On land and in the air, technology was reshaping everything. Robotics and autonomy were leaving laboratories for factories and highways. Vehicles were becoming electrified and software-defined. We were preparing to return to the moon and planning for Mars, even debating the social risks of automation. But at sea, the technology stack had scarcely moved since the 1950s. Shipyards and fleets remained analog, fragmented, and slow."

A career moved from high-energy physics to aerospace autonomy at NASA and then to underwater drone development at MIT for inspecting nuclear reactors. The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 exposed limitations in locating objects at sea and highlighted that the ocean remains poorly mapped and digitized. Technological progress on land and in the air accelerated—robotics, autonomy, electrification, and software-defined vehicles—while the maritime technology stack stayed largely unchanged since the 1950s. Shipyards and fleets remained analog, fragmented, and slow, despite the ocean carrying ninety percent of global trade and critical food, energy, and communications infrastructure.

Read at Big Think