In three words: Speedboat. Submarine. Awesome. The revolutionary Hyper-Sub is a long-range speedboat that is also a true heavy-lift utility submarine. It looks more like a watercraft from the cover of a Clive Cussler novel than it does the product of a 12-year-old’s mind. Actually, it’s both—and the book cover came second.
“I started designing the Hyper-Sub when I was 12,” says Reynolds Marion, inventor of the Hyper-Sub and founder of Hyper-Sub Platform Technologies. “I stayed awake almost every night building it piece by piece in my mind, hoping to one day have a chance to build it.”
That chance came in 2002: “My wife said to me ‘we have been broke before and we can be broke again, but I think God gave this vision to you, and I don’t want to die wondering What if?’ So, we closed a perfectly good business, invested the last money we had to our name, and started building it.”
The idea was that once they started building, people would invest. It was a fine idea. HSP Technologies quickly raised $3 million in capital, completed 21 successful dives, and has garnered the support of Santa Fe College’s Innovative Product Development Center, which is helping to spread word of the Hyper-Sub and its uses.
“We’ve been approached by governments from around the globe who see a real need for the Hyper-Sub for coastal and port security,” Reynolds says. “We have been approached by leading defense contractors as well, conversations with which are constant and ongoing.”
The attention is not surprising. Hyper-subs are designed to be high-speed surface craft that are also deep-dive submarines that can quickly and conveniently deploy from any dock, and so the craft is all but destined to be a rare multi-market vertical machine—as was the helicopter.
Industry leaders in government, military, oil and gas, research and salvage, and tourism acknowledge that the design is easier, more economical, and safer to use than anything that has come before.“It will revolutionize the economy and the ease with which we can now access a subsea environment,” Reynolds says.
Though the Hyper-Sub made history when it proved, over the course of 21 dives, to be the first vessel capable of performing as a true surface vessel that could transition into a true, dry (pressure boundary) cabin submarine, it also demonstrated to be the first submarine capable of parking in waters as shallow as three feet deep after cruising fully submerged in waters as shallow as only 15 feet deep.
“You can step off of a dock, travel anywhere you want to within a 500-mile radius, and then dive with only a throw of a few switches,” Reynolds says.In concept and in addition to the standard surface range of 500 nautical miles, Hyper-Subs should have rough sea safety features, and onboard dive-system recharge capabilities, which will allow for autonomous open sea operation.
As a result, the cost and logistics normally associated with subsea-capable systems for their transport, deployment, and deployment support (as with work-class ROVs or other manned submersibles) is no longer a required penalty for subsea access.“It’s the world’s first, practical, subsea work truck,” Reynolds says. “Unlike any min-sub before, the Hyper-Sub provides a more practical, versatile, and inexpensive way to access, and work in, the sub-sea environment.”
