Oceans Apart: Ice Moon Exploration Will Mirror Terrestrial Subsea Ops
By David Strachan
When NASA’s Europa Clipper launched in October 2024, it marked the opening of a new frontier in ocean exploration. For the first time, a flagship NASA spacecraft was being sent to investigate the habitability of a watery world. With their potential to harbor extraterrestrial life, scientists have long dreamed of exploring the hidden oceans of our solar system. But the defense community has an interest as well – technologically, and quite possibly strategically. As great power subsea competition intensifies here on Earth, its enabling technologies, concepts, and challenges will increasingly inform those of ocean world exploration (and vice versa). And as we inch closer to the deployment of off-world AUVs, the competition and conflict shaping the underwater battlespace here on Earth could spill into our solar system, and beyond.
Eyes on Enceladus
Europa Clipper’s mission was expected to set the stage for Europa Lander—a spacecraft capable of analyzing shallow ice core samples for signs of microbial life, or, more ambitiously, deploying a “cryobot” to melt through tens of kilometers of icepack and release underwater vehicles into the Jovian moon’s inner ocean. But in mid-2025, the mission was effectively cancelled, with NASA citing cost constraints, technological readiness, and mission risk. Undaunted, U.S. scientists shifted their attention to Enceladus, Saturn’s tiny, ice-covered moon. While Europa would have required drilling through tens of kilometers of ice, Enceladus offers localized regions of thinner ice, as well as a much friendlier radiation environment, making it a slightly less complicated, and therefore less risky, prospect for scientific research.
But the United States won’t be alone in this endeavor. The European Space Agency (ESA) has proposed an Enceladus orbiter-lander mission for launch in 2042, and a recent paper published in Chinese Space Science and Technology describes a concept for a lander equipped with an ice drill, sampling system, and a deployable under-ice “probe”—effectively an AUV. While still conceptual, the paper highlights a reality that has become familiar in other domains: China will not be a passive bystander—technologically or geopolitically. And the discovery of life beyond Earth, aside from being a profound scientific triumph, would reverberate well beyond the Chinese scientific community as a unifying symbol of national pride and power.
They’re Here: Otherworldly Subsea Tech
The technologies and operational concepts for ocean world exploration have been under development for many years and have already been undergoing mission testing in the Arctic and Antarctic. Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed Icefin, a slender, tethered AUV which has demonstrated autonomous navigation beneath Antarctic ice shelves, and provided detailed imagery and environmental data in challenging conditions. Austin-based Stone Aerospace has developed a range of platforms suited to through-ice and under-ice operations, including novel UUVs and cryobots—autonomous ice penetrating probes designed to drill through thick layers of ice. The company’s VALKYRIE cryobot uses a high-powered laser to heat the vehicle’s nosecone, while ARCHIMEDES uses direct laser penetration (DLP) to project 5 kW of laser light directly into the ice. Swarming underwater systems could also be key. NASA’s SWIM (Sensing With Independent Microswimmers) program envisions swarms of tiny vehicles released into an extraterrestrial ocean to explore the environment.
While all of these platforms are designed for scientific missions, they must overcome the same unique operational challenges that define modern subsea defense operations—GPS-denied environments, autonomy, reliable navigation, robust communication, and the ability to survive and operate in extreme pressure, darkness, and isolation—challenges that are already being confronted by the U.S. Navy.
Arctic Competition Drives Under-Ice Operations
Even as climate change reshapes the High North, the need for under-ice operational proficiency has only grown. The receding Arctic icepack is intensifying strategic competition, and regional security concerns are driving the development of under-ice sensing, communication, and navigation technologies to ensure effective undersea warfare operations.
The U.S. Navy’s Operation ICE CAMP, formerly Ice Exercise (ICEX), is a biennial event designed to evaluate Arctic under-ice capabilities. Of particular interest to the Navy is the capability for UUVs to navigate under the ice without access to GPS. During ICEX 2020, the Navy experimented with an under-ice positioning system using transponders suspended through the icepack from nodes anchored on the surface, providing a kind of inverted long baseline (LBL) system. In 2022, Unmanned Undersea Vehicles Squadron (UUVRON) ONE used an Iver3-580 to experiment with an upward-looking DVL that used the underside of the surface ice for navigation. In deepwater environments that preclude bottom lock, like the Arctic Ocean, or the oceans of Europa or Enceladus, under-ice navigation methods like this will be essential.
Despite being conducted beneath solid water, under-ice naval operations will still require communication with surface, air, and space assets. To that end, in 2023, researchers from the Naval Postgraduate School developed and tested a device dubbed a cryophone—a hydrophone capable of detecting acoustic communications (ACOMMS) propagating through the icepack. Such a device has potential not only as a communication device, but also as a navigational beacon, an ASW or ISR sensor, or a means to determine surface ice thickness for surfacing submarines. This research parallels similar investigations by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) into communicating with landers or cryobots through Europa’s ice shell. JPL scientists embedded acoustic transceivers in Alaska’s Matanuska Glacier and determined that through-ice ACOMMS was feasible at ranges up to 83 meters, with strong potential for kilometer-scale transmission at lower frequencies.
When Competition Moves Beyond Earth
“[T]he universe is an ocean, the moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island,” said Ye Peijian, Chief Commander and Designer of the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program, drawing a comparison between space exploration and territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas. As great power competition extends into the solar system, ocean worlds will not be immune, and wherever territorial claims go, security and its enabling technologies will inevitably follow.
Cryobots may one day deploy AUVs into Europa’s vast subsurface ocean, and tethered under-ice outposts may dot Enceladus’ south pole. In a time where subsea sabotage is an ongoing geopolitical reality, it is not hard to imagine this threat migrating to faraway watery worlds. Any long-term subsurface presence on Europa or Enceladus would necessitate the emplacement of vulnerable underwater infrastructure to enable energy transfer, navigation, communication, and edge processing, as well as the deployment of vehicles capable of patrolling, inspecting, repairing, and, if necessary, defending it. Such vehicles and infrastructure could very well be direct descendants of today’s naval autonomous systems or NASA’s ocean world prototypes, driven by shared technologies, autonomy frameworks, and mission architectures.
Past as Prologue?
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two (sequel to ice2001: A Space Odyssey), an opportunistic China races a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to Jupiter. Clarke, writing at the height of the Cold War, was well aware of how terrestrial geopolitical forces could influence or undermine the peaceful exploration of space. Decades later, the world finds itself enmeshed in a new Cold War—one playing out across subsea pipelines, fiber-optic cables, rare-earth deposits, and autonomous systems. Enabling technologies—under-ice navigation, autonomy, sensing, and swarm operations—will play an integral role in shaping not only the future subsea battlespace, but great power competition itself, whether under the Arctic ice cap, or far beneath the surface of an alien sea.
