WASHINGTON — Maritime defense tech firm Saronic unveiled plans today for a new shipyard in Brownville, Texas dubbed Port Alpha to bolster its shipbuilding capacity.
The firm will start out building out roughly 800 acres — with the potential to expand to a total of 4,000 acres — as it constructs an entirely new shipyard from the ground up for the project, according to Saronic co-founder and CEO Dino Mavrookas.
“That lets us bring advanced manufacturing, efficient process flows, get to high throughput, take advantage of economies of scale, drive down costs in the shipbuilding process itself,” Mavrookas told reporters on Wednesday.
The shipyard will focus on both defense and commercial ships, and will initially support construction of up to 850-foot ships, with the goal of eventually building 1,200-foot vessels. Likewise, the shipyard will support construction of both manned and unmanned vessels.
“We’re not going to give specifics on what our next product line is going to be, but yes, we are going to build both manned and unmanned ships,” Mavrookas said. “The manned ships are going to be very differentiated in that we’re going to incorporate all of the technology that we’re building to make these manned ships more efficient, and then de-man them as we move into the future.”
Ultimately, Saronic aims to employ 10,000 workers at Port Alpha over the course of the next decade for jobs including welding, machining, as well as positions for robotics, software engineering, and naval architecture. Saronic said that it will partner with the state, county, and local education systems to establish workforce training pipelines for the yard.
The firm is prepared to start construction on Port Alpha later this year, and start operations in 2028.
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Saronic currently makes several autonomous surface vessels at its shipyard in Franklin, La. — including the Corsair that US forces are employing in operations in the Middle East. For example, several Corsair vessels struck a submarine and ship maintenance facility in Iran on Sunday, marking the first time American unmanned surface vessels have been employed in combat operations, according to US Central Command.
Despite the recent use in the Middle East, Mavrookas said the new plans for the additional shipyard were unrelated and that the new announcement comes shortly after finalizing the deal.
“We want to get to work, so this is not something that we kept under wraps and waited for the right moment to announce,” Mavrookas said. “It just so happens that Corsair has been very very successful in the Strait of Hormuz, providing those capabilities that you have seen right before this announcement.”