The green and black camouflage submarine's steering mechanism failed due to an electrical malfunction. It veered left and briefly surfaced just before it sank to the bottom of the water with one soul aboard.
"He's not moving," the Navy diver in the "Make Diving Deep Again" shirt mumbles. His colleagues in scuba gear give the vessel a few seconds to recover before jumping into the 16-million-gallon tank to retrieve the sub. The diver picks up a bullhorn.
"Come down here and get your boat," he says.
Every two years the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division allows high school and college students to race their human-powered submarines on a 100-meter stretch of its 1,886-foot-long Deep Water Basin. More than 20 teams have come from Florida, California, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany to put their engineering skills to the test in the quest to break 9 knots. It is Wednesday, June 28, and many teams are testing their boats in the track for the first time. They are having a rough go of it, especially the one painted like an ice cream cone that continues to u-turn and sink to the bottom of the starting line.
"In an attempt to build a pretty sub, I'd say they severely degraded their hydrodynamic capabilities," a senior Naval officer muses.
The green and black submarine surfaces from the bottom of the 22-foot tank with a crack in the nose. Its pilot, a bearded man in cycling shoes, exits the tank visibly annoyed. Two young men tow the aching vessel back to the dry dock and then to the parking lot for emergency maintenance. This is not the way the defending champions envisioned their day going.
École de Technologie Supérieure, an engineering school located in Montreal, Canada, has dominated the International Sub Races for two generations. After taking home best overall design for its single propeller OMER IX in 2015, the technical university built OMER X in the hopes of breaking the record speed of 4.9 knots in the non-propeller division—a record set by the school's OMER VI in 2009. Students spent four months hand designing and personally machining the 10-foot, 187-pound vessel, as well as fundraising and seeking out sponsorship deals to cover the costs. It is propelled by crossing alternating fins on top of the sub and powered by bike pedals. Team Captain Jordan Gagnon, a 22-year-old senior majoring in mechanical engineering, is not shy about the ETS' aim.
"Our goal is to win first overall, but what we really want is to beat the world record," he says.
Carderock is located just outside Washington, D.C., in West Bethesda, Md., and is the testing ground for naval vessels; no ship enters the fleet without Carderock's extensive model evaluations. Its facilities have pioneered everything from hull design to the acoustics that allow U.S. submarines to sneak silently through the water. It has hosted the human-powered sub races since 1995. Former base commander Captain Charles Behrle (ret.) now serves as the president of the Foundation for Underwater Research & Education, the non-profit behind the competition. His organization provides food and housing to the contestants while the Navy covers the costs of opening up access to the tank and flying its Experimental Dive Team up from Florida to oversee safety on the 100-meter course. The costs are well worth the return for the U.S. military.
"We're getting exposure to young men and women who know fundamental naval engineering principles, but they haven't been colored by experience, so they bring unique ideas to the challenge. This is the perfect environment to test those ideas," he says. "The Navy gets an opportunity to pursue some of the most talented and technologically innovative engineering students in the country."
The Navy, as well as event sponsor and Defense Department contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, have HR booths on the scene.
Charlotte George, the base's head liaison coordinating the races, credits her participation in in the 2009 competition with her decision to work for the Navy. She won a Defense Department SMART scholarship designed to attract engineers in 2010 and took a civilian job at the base in 2012 after graduating from Florida Atlantic University. She says the competition gave her all she needed to succeed as a naval engineer.
"I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take the job here," she says. "That exposure got me into ocean engineering. The whole process of planning and building a sub, on-the-fly engineering, and teambuilding—I use that everyday at my job."
She has one key bit of advice for the contestants today: "An engineer's best friend is always zip ties, duct tape, and maybe a couple screws."
Back outside the tank, Gagnon's team is working to repair the nose of the wounded vessel and tinkering with the electrical wiring that malfunctioned under water. They cover the hole in the nose with duct tape and a junior member of the squad scrawls, "oops," across the center.
"The cable worked fine on shore, but once we got in the water it must have come loose," Gagnon says. "We already crashed it once, so we have no where to go but up."
Despite the slipshod repair job, they are still the team to beat, according to Harry Crocker, a first year Masters candidate at Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences.
"We're in the single-person, non-propeller division, so our goal is to finish second behind OMER," he says.
Crocker, a British native, watches the school's Rivershark crawl across the tank before veering left and breeching the surface after 40 meters, which disqualifies it from completing the run. The program says that this boat is powered by a "Hobie Cat Mirage Drive," which Crocker attempts to explain in detail before noticing the Washington Free Beacon's eyes glaze over.
"It's a stepping motion," he says.
Judge Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper is in charge of running extensive safety checks on each vessel before they are cleared to enter the tank. The retired Navy Captain served as Carderock's base commander from 2011 to 2013 after finishing up a 13-year career as an astronaut, which included two shuttle flights in 2006 and 2008. She is impressed with the engineering designs on display, including the transition from mechanical power—i.e. physical peddling—to the use of electronic signals to communicate the peddling motion to the vessel's engine.
"We are starting to see more electronics and fly-by-wire technology. Those are the same sorts of changes we saw in airplanes over a couple decades, but this is happening in the space of a few years. One team is even exploring an autopilot feature," she says. "That's our future workforce right there."
The University of California at San Diego team is working furiously on its sub, Spicy Tuna Roll, in the tent neighboring OMER X. Team captain Alistair Twombly, a senior majoring in aerospace engineering, is scrambling to fix the drive shaft of his own 10-foot boat, which is powered by oscillating tail fins. The team built the boat for about $10,000, which it acquired through fundraising, as well as donated fiberglass material from the SunRez Company. Twombly was a part of the 2013 team that failed to complete the race after encountering steering malfunctions. He said the team would probably not medal, but hopes to "finish the course after all the hard work we've done."
Twombly says that competition may be the wrong word for the event; he sees it more as a learning opportunity.
"I love wandering around and learning from the other teams, talking with them about their designs and their tech," he says.
The races wrap up on Friday. OMER X falls just short of the record reaching a top-speed of 4.58 knots after successfully completing 14 of 20 runs in the tank. Rivershark manages second place at 1.84 knots. Spicy Tuna Roll fixes the driveshaft and finally completes the course after 4 runs, sneaking across the finish line at 1.33 knots.