1. Breakdown how Seasats went from ocean tech startup to international developer of leading-edge ASVs…
The Seasats story started back in 2011, in Rhode Island, with a group of friends trying to send a message from the east coast of the United States across the Atlantic to Spain. Much of the technology that drives vessels today didn’t exist back then, and so the resource-limited team began to explore how to build low-cost, reliable, and portable systems that they could manage themselves.
Almost a decade later, when Seasats was officially incorporated as SeaSatellites, Inc., our founders returned with many of the same design goals from their “garage” project 10 years earlier. The unmanned surface vehicle (USV) industry was producing prohibitively expensive products that were unwieldly to use and required large launch and recovery teams. They believed that pricing and logistics constraints were hobbling the market’s growth.
Some of Seasats’ earliest successes included pilot science missions with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, commercial services missions, and demonstrations for the Navy Postgraduate School.
Building on lessons learned, we launched the Lightfish, Seasats’ production-ready autonomous surface vehicle (ASV, distinguishing from other remote control, non-autonomous vehicles). The first units were delivered to customers in 2023, and they are now rolling out of our production facilities in San Diego. We are now able to deliver bigger mission impacts through scale.
2. How is the Lightfish unique among a growing range of commercially available ASVs in the marketplace?
The Lightfish ASV is an 11-foot long, 3-foot wide, 340-lb long endurance vehicle. The US Navy would classify this as a Very Small Class USV, which is any unmanned vessel under 7 meters (23 ft) in length.
Being small has many benefits that are often overlooked. For one, our commercial and DoD customers are often logistically constrained, and being able to hand or carry launch off a beach or boat without a crane immediately extends the range of operational possibilities. Being compact also reduces the vehicles’ visual and radar signatures, which on long-endurance missions drastically reduces the odds of tampering or capture. Other ASVs have been captured before, emphasizing how important it is that these vehicles be able to see without being seen.
Another key aspect of the Lightfish is its flexibility in terms of software and payload. This has enabled a variety of payloads (35+ and counting) to be integrated quickly and cost effectively. For the DoD, this has meant that the vehicles can be configured appropriately for each mission and can tie seamlessly into common operating pictures and command software.
As the company has matured and scaled, the Lightfish is available in several default configurations: Security Lightfish, fitted with EO/IR cameras, RADAR, and other sensors for monitoring surface and subsurface threats; Environmental Lightfish, fitted with subsurface water quality and current sensors, a profiling winch, and a weather station; Hydrographic Lightfish is fitted with a high-quality multi-beam echosounder that has been tested to produce high quality data to depths of 250 meters, even in serious sea states; and the Base Model Lightfish for customers who have their own specific payloads.
3. Tell us more about how Seasats is attempting to demonstrate the Lightfish’s capacity for remote operations…
A core tenet of Seasats since its founding has been to deliver reliable products for open ocean missions. We avoid hyperbole by demonstrating Lightfish’s core capabilities through publicly trackable cross-ocean voyages. The objective of these missions is to learn and continuously improve our product, while also showing the public what a small autonomous vessel can do in the largest body of water on earth.
We learned a great deal from our first mission, in 2024, and on January 13, 2025, we launched a Lightfish aiming for Tokyo with stops in Oahu and Guam. As of this writing, landfall in Hawaii is expected on March 1. After some missions around Hawaii’s islands, we plan to continue to Guam. To follow the ASV’s progress, visit: https://track.seasats.com.
4. When it comes to defense applications, can you share a little more about your partnership with Task Force 59?
Task Force 59 (TF59) was created under the leadership of Vice Admiral Brad Cooper to integrate unmanned systems and artificial intelligence into maritime operations for the 5th Fleet area of operations. Seasats first became involved with TF59 in late 2022 by participating in Digital Horizon. TF59’s operations focused on testing commercial solutions to deliver new maritime domain awareness capabilities with unprecedented speed and low costs. Seasats’ early participation was with X3 prototype ASVs, and we received enthusiastic feedback about the platforms’ stealth, low logistics, and reliability.
That early success led to a multi-year contract working with TF59 and successful operations made possible with a small fleet of Lightfish ASVs. The missions supported by the Lightfish expanded beyond just maritime domain awareness, and we hope we’ve provided some good examples of how commercial technology can be leveraged for US Navy missions. We’re extremely grateful to have worked with the TF59.
5. With one eye on the growing impact of automation, what is Seasats’ long-term vision for ASVs?
We’re already seeing a clear shift in emphasis from one or two vehicle deployments towards large scale constellation deployments. Multiple Lightfish units can be launched from shore or a ship, each configured with appropriate sensors, and can then provide a persistent, mobile mesh for monitoring and securing the maritime environment. Leveraging a large network of comparatively low-cost nodes, these systems cover a much wider area than any single vessel could. Those meshes also provide resiliency, since any adversary would need to find and destroy many nodes to take the entire system offline.
Finding kayak-sized vehicles in an ocean is a needle-in-a-haystack situation. Crucially, these meshes will cross domains. Lightfish will work with interceptors and UUVs, providing sensing and communications through the sea-air interface.
Seasats will continue to build on the current IP stack. The Lightfish is our core long-endurance platform, but we have plans for future models to further address unfolding defense and commercial needs. Making a system “easy” is really hard work, but we’ve built a strong foundation, and with our growing team and partner network we’re creating wins for end-users.
This feature appeared in ON&T Magazine’s 2025 March Edition, Naval Defense & Intelligence, to read more access the magazine here.
