"Every Rocket Component, Every Satellite Part, Every Drop of Fuel – It All Moves By Ship": Bo Jardine, CEO & Co-Founder of Eureka Naval Craft, on Why SpaceX Barges Are Billion-Dollar Sitting Ducks and How Space Security Starts in The Ocean

Here's something nobody talks about: SpaceX launches rockets from ocean barges with zero armed security. None. These billion-dollar spacecraft sit on floating platforms in international waters, protected by... the Coast Guard being somewhere nearby, maybe. Bo Jardine used to protect oil platforms off Somalia from actual pirates with RPGs. Now he watches SpaceX barges from his home in Houston and can't believe what he's seeing. Because the pirates don't need boats anymore. They need $600 and a trip to Best Buy.

In Ukraine right now, 70% of battlefield deaths come from drones. Not bullets. Not bombs. Drones. The same drones you can buy at the mall. Mexico has seen over 1,000 drone attacks in the past year. The cartels have figured out what the space industry hasn't: a $600 DJI Phantom beats a $67 million Falcon 9 every time, because the attacker only needs to succeed once. But here's where it gets worse—remember SOSUS, the Cold War underwater listening network that could hear Soviet subs from thousands of miles away? It cost billions to build. Today, any teenager can buy an underwater drone on Alibaba for five grand that SOSUS won't detect until it's 500 meters from target. Not miles. Meters.

Jardine isn't some conspiracy theorist or doomsday prepper. He secured Shell platforms in East Africa, ran vessels through the Straits of Malacca, dealt with real maritime threats that had guns and boats and bad intentions. Now at Eureka Naval Craft, he builds autonomous naval vessels with sonar and lightweight torpedoes specifically designed to protect high-value maritime assets. His Bengal can do 50 knots. His Panther has ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) capabilities. He has the solution.

The space industry won't buy it, because acknowledging the threat means admitting that every launch for the past decade has been one motivated teenager away from disaster. And when it happens (not if, when), it won't just destroy a rocket. It'll prove that while we were dreaming about Mars, we forgot to lock the front door.

You've spent decades building naval systems. Which autonomous ship tech carries over to spacecraft, and where does that comparison stop working?

“Let’s first talk about the environment,” Jardine begins, settling into teaching mode like someone who has drawn this connection many times and finally found a willing audience. “When you look at space and the ocean, there’s actually more parallel than contrast.”

He lays out the taxonomy with precision. “You have the ocean surface—what I call terrestrial. Then there’s the subsurface, which I call inner space, and it has shocking parallels to actual space. NASA doesn’t train astronauts underwater by accident. They do it because water physics approximate zero gravity better than anything else on Earth.”

The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at Johnson Space Center proves the point. Containing 6.2 million gallons of water, it allows astronauts to practice complex EVA operations in simulated weightlessness—a training method NASA has used for decades because the neutral buoyancy of water is the closest physical analog to space.

For Jardine, the overlap is more than theoretical. “Go to Brownsville, Texas. Fly into the airport where SpaceX has their hub. The terminal has all this SpaceX stuff at the end, but at the beginning? It talks about shipping. It quotes maritime history. Even Musk acknowledges the lineage.”

That juxtaposition, maritime quotes alongside SpaceX displays, captures an unspoken truth: space exploration is following the template of ocean exploration. The same human drives, the same engineering challenges, the same isolation from civilization all reappear in a different medium.

Technical parallels make the link even clearer. “Ocean conditions change without warning: calm seas become 40-foot waves in minutes. That’s your solar-storm equivalent. Both environments demand fatigue-life design: structures that survive not just one storm, but thousands of stress cycles.”

Navigation challenges reinforce the point. “Everyone assumes GPS just works. But we’re seeing spoofing, jamming, and deliberate outages. Ships are reverting to inertial navigation: pure physics-based positioning that doesn’t need satellites.” He lets the irony settle in. “The maritime industry is learning to navigate without space assets because those assets have become unreliable. Meanwhile, spacecraft need the same inertial navigation because there’s no GPS in deep space.”

The subsea comparison drives it home. Jardine spent years at Shell working with equipment that must function for decades without human intervention. “A subsea Christmas tree (that’s our term for underwater well valves), operates at 1,500 - 2,000 meters water depth, at pressures that would crush you instantly. It has to work perfectly for 30 years.You can’t send anyone down to fix it.” Modern subsea production systems routinely operate at those depths, where pressure reaches 300 times that of Earth’s atmosphere—conditions as hostile as space itself.

“Compare that to satellites,” he continues, warming to his theme. “Same parameters; 30-year design life, no maintenance possible, extreme environment. The difference? If your subsea system fails, you lose millions per day in production. If a satellite fails, you lose what—some TV channels? Until recently, the consequences weren’t comparable. But now everything depends on space assets. A satellite failure could crash banking, navigation, communications. The stakes have equalized.”

The human factor reinforces the connection. “I have classmates from Massachusetts Maritime Academy who went on to work for SpaceX and Blue Origin. Why? Because if you can navigate a supertanker through the Strait of Malacca in a storm, you can figure out orbital mechanics. It’s all just physics and risk management.”

China's launched hundreds of satellites in a year, similar to how the Navy spreads sensors across oceans. Which naval command and control methods could counter Chinese anti-satellite threats?

“Let me start with what’s already happening to ships, because that’s your preview of space,” Jardine says, his tone shifting to operational concern. “GPS spoofing isn’t theoretical anymore. Ships appear hundreds of miles from their actual location. Their clocks are wrong. Navigation systems compromised.”

He points to a striking example. In 2019, mass GPS spoofing incidents around Shanghai affected hundreds of vessels, making them appear miles from their true positions—a glimpse of the deception tactics likely to play out in orbit.

“The maritime industry’s response? We’re reverting to 1940s technology that actually works,” he explains. “Inertial navigation: gyroscopes and accelerometers that track movement from a known starting point. Magnetic compasses. Even celestial navigation is making a comeback. The irony is beautiful: we’re protecting ourselves from space threats by pretending space doesn’t exist.”

But Jardine believes the real innovation lies not in shielding assets but in dispersing them. “Aircraft carriers are magnificent…and magnificent targets. Anyone with a satellite can track them. The Chinese claim they can track our submarines from space now. Might be propaganda, might not. But you know what they can’t track as easily? Our unmanned surface vessels.”

Here his company’s technology enters the picture. “Eureka’s vessels are between 17.5 and 36 meters long, moving at 35 to 50 knots with minimal heat signature. We can hide against beach clutter, blend with civilian traffic, change our electromagnetic profile. A satellite searching for us would need to scan millions of square miles for something the size of a fishing boat moving twice as fast as any fishing boat should.”

The underwater domain adds another layer of complexity. “Here’s the nightmare scenario everyone should understand. Some unmanned underwater vehicles (suicide drones, basically) can’t be detected until they’re 500 meters away. Not miles. Meters. By the time you know it’s there, it’s too late.”

He sees the same principle of distribution reshaping space strategy. “Why have one massive, expensive satellite when you can have a thousand small ones? We’re already seeing this with megaconstellations. But here’s what’s next: mother ships in space that release swarms of smaller craft. Some for communication, some for surveillance, some for… other purposes.”

That philosophy of redundancy, Jardine notes, cuts across industries. “In oil and gas, we learned never to have a single point of failure. One pipeline ruptures? You need alternates. One platform goes down? Production continues elsewhere. The U.S. military calls it distributed maritime operations. Same concept: spread your assets so losing one doesn’t end the mission.”

He pushes the analogy further, envisioning an era when naval and space operations overlap. “We’re heading toward Space Marines—not the video game kind, but actual boarding parties for spacecraft. Just like we have VBSS teams for vessels, we’ll need teams that can intercept, board, and inspect suspicious satellites. The technology exists. The doctrine doesn’t.”

Drawing from his weapons advisory work, Jardine underscores the strategic math. “Redundancy means survival. In Ukraine, they’re launching drones in swarms because even if you shoot down 80%, the remaining 20% complete the mission. Apply that to space—launch 100 microsatellites, lose 80 to anti-satellite weapons, and you still have 20 functioning nodes. The math favors the attacker until you distribute enough to make the attack pointless.”

You've worked on offshore charging buoys and methanol fuel systems. Could methanol reformation work on the moon with local oxygen?

“Let me tell you about the most underappreciated technology transfer in space history,” Jardine says, clearly energized to talk about something optimistic for once. “SpaceX’s entire cryogenic system—the technology that lets them use super-cooled methane as fuel—came directly from the LNG shipping industry.”

Before moving into space-adjacent work, Jardine managed global methane projects at BG Group (British Gas), later acquired by Shell for $70 billion. “LNG carriers, containment systems, the whole cryogenic chain. Temperature management at minus 162 degrees Celsius. Same technology SpaceX needed for their Raptor engines.” SpaceX’s Raptor engines, of course, rely on liquid methane and liquid oxygen—cryogenic expertise honed over decades in the maritime LNG world.

“The beauty of methane in space?” He grins at the irony. “No environmental concerns. On Earth, we worry about methane slip (unburned gas escaping). It’s a greenhouse gas twenty-five times worse than CO₂. In space? Burn all you want. No ozone layer to damage.”

For Jardine, the real breakthrough is thinking in closed loops. “Every human on the moon is a methane factory. Waste products, biological processes. They all produce methane. Right now, companies like Harvey Gulf are running entire vessel fleets on methane from pig farms and landfills. It’s called green methane, and it’s absolutely legitimate.”

Harvey Gulf’s LNG-powered offshore supply vessels already run on liquefied natural gas, including biomethane from agricultural waste, technology he sees as directly applicable to lunar operations.

“Now imagine a moon base,” he continues, sketching the cycle in the air. “Human waste goes into digesters. Digesters produce methane. Methane powers your rovers, your generators, maybe even your return vehicle. It’s the same circular economy we’re building for offshore platforms, just in a different ocean.”

The analogy extends naturally to power infrastructure. “We’re deploying charging buoys for vessels waiting offshore. They sit idle for days, burning fuel just to maintain position. Why not plug in? Same problem in space: small satellites run out of power and we burn them up in the atmosphere. That’s insane. Why not have a charging station in orbit?”

He underscores the economics. “We spend millions launching a satellite, it works perfectly for two years, then dies because the battery’s depleted. Meanwhile, the solar panels still work, the instruments still function, everything’s fine except power. A space-based charging buoy could extend satellite life by decades.”

SpaceX uses ocean barges with dynamic positioning. If a nation sent underwater drones to disrupt them, what defenses exist? How vulnerable are these platforms to swarm attacks?

“Full disclosure before I answer,” Jardine says firmly. “I don’t just work at Eureka. I have an investment company. I advise loitering-munition companies. I work on counter-drone systems. I’m telling you this because I need you to understand: I’m not speculating about threats. I’m working with others on building both the weapons and the defenses.”

His assessment is blunt. “Space launch platforms are among the softest targets in the entire defense infrastructure. Softer than airports. Softer than ports. A rocket on a barge is a billion-dollar sitting duck.” He lays out a vulnerability matrix that should worry anyone invested in space. “First, the platform itself. SpaceX’s autonomous spaceport drone ships (Just Read the Instructions, A Shortfall of Gravitas), are engineering marvels. Dynamic positioning can hold station in heavy seas. But armed defenses? Zero. Chase boats? They stay way back because nobody wants to be near a rocket that might explode.” SpaceX’s drone ships operate in the Atlantic and Pacific, recovering first stages; but they have no documented defensive capabilities.

“Second, the launch vulnerability,” he continues. “A rocket’s most vulnerable during the first thirty seconds of flight. It’s moving slowly, full of fuel, basically a controlled bomb. In Boca Chica, Texas, any hobbyist can fly a drone close enough to film launches. Same drone with two ounces of explosive? Game over.”

He underscores the risk with current conflict data. “In Ukraine, seventy percent of fatalities are from drones. Not artillery, not bullets—drones. In Mexico, our neighbor, over a thousand drone attacks in the past year. The cartels have better drone programs than some militaries.”

Jardine’s experience securing oil platforms shows what’s missing. “At Shell, I ran security vessels off East Africa, West Africa, India. Pirates, terrorists, hostile nations—we faced them all. Every high-value platform had multiple defensive layers: armed patrol boats, underwater sensors, air surveillance, counter-drone systems. Cost millions per platform annually.”

He contrasts that with today’s space operations. “Now compare that to space launch. No patrol vessels. No underwater monitoring. No counter-drone systems. They’re relying on the Coast Guard, maybe, if they’re nearby. It’s criminal negligence.”

Eureka’s systems could fill the gap, but industry inertia remains. “Our Bengal can do fifty knots, fast enough to intercept any surface threat. Our Panther has sonar and lightweight torpedoes for submarine threats. We could establish a defensive perimeter around any launch platform. But the space industry won’t pay for security until someone demonstrates the vulnerability. Unfortunately, that demonstration will cost lives.”

And the swarm problem makes everything worse. “One drone? You might stop it. Fifty drones from different directions? Some will get through. And here’s the thing—the attacker can afford to lose forty-nine drones if one succeeds. The defender can’t afford to miss even once.”

China hides military assets in civilian fishing fleets. If they're hiding anti-satellite weapons in commercial satellites, how do we tell threats from harmless Starlink-type craft?

“Gray zone warfare is the destruction of clear categories,” Jardine explains, drawing on years of experience with maritime deception. “China has perfected this at sea. They have a ‘civilian’ fishing fleet larger than most navies: boats with reinforced hulls, military-grade communications, and crews trained by the PLA Navy.” China’s maritime militia comprises hundreds of vessels that appear civilian but conduct military operations, particularly in disputed waters.

“The problem compounds when you can’t tell combatant from commercial,” he continues. “In World War II, you flew your flag…enemy or neutral. Today? That Chinese fishing boat might be gathering intelligence. That cargo ship might be laying mines. That yacht might have anti-ship missiles. You don’t know until it’s too late.”

Space, he warns, faces the same ambiguity, only worse. “At least with ships, you can board them. Send a team over, inspect the cargo, check the crew. In space? You can’t pull over a satellite for inspection. By the time you’re close enough to investigate, you’re close enough to be attacked.”

This dual-use reality creates impossible targeting dilemmas. “Here’s a scenario that we're actually war-gaming. Offshore supply vessels (OSVs) traditionally serve oil platforms. Now we’re converting them to unmanned military vessels. Same hull, same profile, different mission. So what happens in a conflict? The enemy has to assume every OSV is military. They’ll sink them all. Civilian energy infrastructure becomes a legitimate target because we’ve erased the distinction.”

Electronic intelligence offers only partial answers. “Different systems have different electromagnetic signatures. A fishing boat shouldn’t emit like a warship. Military radar has distinct characteristics. But everyone’s getting smarter about emission control: burst transmissions, frequency hopping, mimicking civilian patterns.”

His own company confronts this reality every day. “Eureka’s vessels can mimic fishing boats, match their speed, emissions, behavior patterns. Only close inspection reveals the weapons systems. That’s our advantage, but it’s also the problem—everyone’s doing it now.”

The maritime inspection challenge, Jardine says, foreshadows space. “We need vessels (and spacecraft), that can approach and investigate unknown contacts. Check their emissions, observe their behavior, maybe even get close enough for visual inspection. But that requires numbers we don’t have.”

The subsurface dimension unsettles him most. “My friend’s company makes hydrogen-powered unmanned submarines. The fuel is literally explosive. It’s an underwater bomb that can stay submerged for weeks. Completely undetectable until it’s too late. Now imagine that same concept in space—dormant satellites that activate when targets approach.”

His conclusion is stark. “The truth is, we’re entering an era where you have to assume everything is a threat until proven otherwise. That fishing boat, that commercial satellite, that cargo container. Any could be weaponized. Paranoia isn’t mental illness anymore; it’s operational necessity.”

Deepwater Horizon showed how automation can avalanche into disaster. What shutdown protocols from offshore drilling should spacecraft adopt?

“I need to be respectful here,” Jardine begins carefully. “I had friends and colleagues who knew people who died onDeepwater Horizon. Families lost loved ones. The industry lost innocence. But we learned lessons written in blood and oil.” The 2010 catastrophe killed eleven people, caused the largest marine oil spill in history, and triggered sweeping changes in offshore safety regulations.

“The catastrophe wasn’t one failure. It was cascading failures that automation made worse,” he explains. “The blowout preventer didn’t work. The emergency disconnect failed. The deadman switch didn’t activate. Alarms were disabled to avoid waking the crew. Every safety system failed, and automation connected them all into one massive failure chain.”

He draws a direct parallel to an earlier disaster. “In 1988, 167 people died on Piper Alpha because systems designed to prevent disaster actually enabled it. Automated pumps kept sending oil to a platform that was already exploding. Firewalls that should have compartmentalized damage instead trapped people. These disasters birthed modern safety culture.”

What changed after those tragedies reshaped an entire industry. “We now design for graceful failure, not perfect operation,” Jardine says. “Two to four times the minimum redundancy. Physical interlocks that can’t be overridden by software. Manual backups for every automated system. And most importantly, human circuit breakers who can pull the plug.”

He argues that spacecraft need these lessons even more urgently. “A spacecraft with cascading automation failure can’t call for help. It can’t send a repair team. It’s Deepwater Horizon if nobody could reach the platform. You get one chance to design it right.”

Jardine outlines the key protocols space systems should adopt: “Multiple independent kill switches, not routed through the same computer. Segmented autonomy loops so one failure doesn’t cascade. Physical safeguards that work without power. And for God’s sake, train people to mistrust automation.”

He shares a cautionary tale from his own experience. “A New Zealand Navy ship plowed into a reef, caught fire, and then sank. This accident involved a converted multi-purpose subsea supply vessel from the Oil & Gas industry, equipped with dynamic positioning (DP). The crew didn’t understand the DP system was engaged. They tried to motor away from the reef, but the DP system drove them straight into the reef. They fought the computer until they hit the reef. Multi- Million dollar mistake because nobody understood what the automation was doing.”

The space applications are obvious. “Every spacecraft needs what we call a ‘deadman switch,’ but one that actually works. If communication is lost for X minutes, automatic safeguards engage. Maybe that’s deorbiting, maybe it’s shutting down transmitters, maybe it’s physical separation of components. But it has to be mechanical, not software.”

His philosophy is simple but uncompromising. “Things will fail. That’s not pessimism, it’s physics. Entropy always wins. The question isn’t preventing all failures. It's preventing failures from becoming catastrophes. Design your systems so when they break, they break safe.”

Given the USO/UAP phenomenon and your subsea experience, what are the physics-based limitations of ocean monitoring? Could objects move through water without detection using current technology?

“I’m going to approach this technically, not philosophically,” Jardine says, choosing his words carefully. “I’ve been a diver, a boat operator, worked subsea—I know water as a medium. And water doesn’t lie.”

He starts with the physics that most USO believers overlook. “Water is 800 times denser than air. Moving through it at speed requires enormous energy and creates unavoidable signatures: pressure waves, thermal traces, acoustic signatures, bioluminescence from disturbed microorganisms. You can’t violate physics, no matter how advanced your technology is.”

The Russians tried to cheat those rules with supercavitation, he notes. “Basically surrounding a torpedo with an air bubble so it flies through water instead of pushing through it. The Shkval torpedo can do 200 knots underwater. But it’s loud as hell. You can hear it from miles away.”

Yet detection remains far from comprehensive. “That said, our oceans are essentially unmonitored. We’ve mapped more of Mars than our ocean floor. SOSUS, our Cold War submarine detection network, covers maybe one percent of ocean volume. A small object moving slowly at depth? We’d never know it existed.” The SOSUS network was revolutionary for tracking Soviet submarines, but even today it blankets only a tiny fraction of the ocean.

What worries Jardine isn’t extraterrestrial craft but human innovation. “Here’s what keeps me up at night. Not alien technology, but human technology. Metamaterials that bend acoustic waves. Active noise cancellation that creates zones of silence. Biomimetic propulsion that looks like whale movement. These aren’t science fiction. They're DARPA projects.”

He points to recent advances as proof. “The U.S. Navy’s got that Manta Ray unmanned submarine—looks exactly like a giant ray, moves like one too. Almost no acoustic signature. China’s building similar systems. In ten years, we might have thousands of these things prowling the oceans, virtually undetectable.”

So when people report impossible underwater sightings, Jardine stays grounded. “When someone claims they saw something impossible underwater, I don’t think of aliens. I think classified programs. The ocean’s the perfect place to hide advanced technology. No satellites can see through water. Civilians can’t accidentally stumble across your test site. And if something goes wrong, it sinks.”

His conclusion is pragmatic and unsettling. “Whether it’s aliens or advanced human technology doesn’t matter tactically. What matters is that our detection systems have massive gaps. If someone, terrestrial or otherwise, wanted to operate undetected underwater, they absolutely could. And that should terrify everyone more than any UFO story.”

If the Strait of Hormuz or South China Sea closed tomorrow, which space supply chains would fail first? How dependent is the space industry on maritime choke points?

“People don’t understand civilization runs on shipping until the ships stop coming,” Jardine says with visible frustration. “They think their Amazon package materializes from the internet. They don’t realize it came on a container ship through three different straits that could close tomorrow.”

The numbers back him up. “21% of global oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. 35% of all maritime trade crosses the South China Sea. The Suez Canal handles 12% of global trade. Close any of these, and the world economy crashes within days.” The Strait of Hormuz, he reminds, is only twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. “Iran has repeatedly threatened to close it. A few mines, a couple of sunken tankers, and you’ve got a global energy crisis.”

For space, the impact would be immediate. “The industry dies overnight,” he says flatly. “Rockets need exotic materials: special aluminum alloys from Russia, rare earth elements from China, carbon fiber from Japan. Satellites need components from dozens of countries. The supply chain is a spider web, and maritime shipping is every strand.”

He offers concrete examples. “SpaceX’s Raptor engines need special nickel alloys. Where’s nickel mined?Indonesia and the Philippines. How does it move? Ships through the South China Sea. China closes that strait, SpaceX stops building rockets.” Critical materials tell the same story. “Seventeen rare earth elements (90% controlled by China), all moved by maritime shipping.”

What worries him even more are the cascading effects. “Satellites need helium for cooling. Helium comes from natural gas processing. Natural gas moves on LNG carriers. Disrupt LNG shipping, and six months later satellites start failing because there’s no helium for ground stations.”

History provides an unsettling parallel. “Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because we cut off their oil. They needed resources to continue their expansion. When maritime trade stopped, war became inevitable. Same dynamics today, just different players.”

His assessment of U.S. priorities is blunt. “We became a maritime power in World War II. We’ve forgotten that. China hasn’t. They have the world’s largest navy by hull count. They’re building a fleet specifically designed to control maritime choke points. Meanwhile, we’re arguing about pronouns on Navy ships.”

Jardine’s perspective is shaped by what he calls the “Goonies generation”; born in 1979, straddling analog and digital worlds. “I grew up with everything from a landline phone to cell phones. Early days, dial-up internet. I was still the kid who could go out at night and play in the park and have just as good of a time with my first Nintendo.” That dual experience, he says, makes the vulnerability clearer. “My son just turned thirteen. He needs constant internet and connectivity for everything. God forbid any of this ever goes out—how many people can function without it now?”

The warning for space is direct. “The space industry thinks they’re separate from maritime trade. They’re not. Every rocket component, every satellite part, every drop of fuel, it all moves by ship. Control the oceans, and you control space. China understands this. Russia understands this. We’re pretending physics doesn’t apply because we have cool rockets.”

The solution, Jardine argues, requires fundamental restructuring. “We need to rebuild domestic supply chains. Mine our own materials. Build our own components. But that takes decades and trillions of dollars. In the meantime, we’re one closed Strait away from losing space superiority.”

He ends with a sober reminder. “We live on Earth, not in space. We sail on oceans, not in orbit. The future of space depends on controlling ancient waterways that have mattered since humans built the first boat. Forget that, and your satellites become very expensive debris.”

Author's Analysis

​​Picture the first Space Marines boarding a suspicious Chinese "weather satellite" in 2030. Their magnetic boots clamp onto the hull as they prepare to breach, just like their predecessors boarded Somali pirate vessels centuries earlier. But unlike maritime boarding parties who could at least see their target's deck, these marines face total uncertainty: any satellite could hide weapons, any commercial craft could be military. Jardine isn't being theatrical when he predicts Space Marines; he's following the iron law of human conflict. Wherever humans can go, they'll need soldiers to secure it. The U.S. Navy birthed the U.S. Marines in 1775 because ships needed protection. The U.S. Space Force will birth something similar because physics doesn't change, only the altitude does.

But Jardine's darker insight cuts deeper than space piracy. He sees supply chains as the real weapon. China doesn't need to shoot down our satellites when they control the rare earth elements needed to build them. Close the South China Sea for a week and watch SpaceX run out of helium coolant. Blockade the Strait of Hormuz and satellite production stops for lack of specialized alloys. We've built a space economy that depends on shipping routes older than Christianity. The vulnerability is so structural, so fundamental, that fixing it would require remaking global trade itself. China understands this; they're building a navy to control these chokepoints while we're building a Space Force to fight battles in orbit. They're playing checkers on Earth while we're playing chess in space.

What's most troubling isn't what Jardine says, it's what he's demonstrated. His company builds 50-knot autonomous vessels with torpedoes specifically to protect maritime assets, yet the space industry won't even return his calls. They can't acknowledge the threat without admitting a decade of inexcusable negligence. So they wait, hoping nobody notices that a teenager with a drone can destroy a billion-dollar rocket, that our satellites depend on cargo ships, that the future of space runs through waters any nation can close tomorrow. Is our rush to colonize Mars blinding us to Earth's vulnerabilities? When the first space launch platform gets attacked, will we finally listen to people like Jardine? Or will we discover, too late, that while we were looking up at the stars, someone else was quietly taking control of the oceans beneath them?

About Bo Jardine

Bo Jardine is the CEO and co-founder of Eureka Naval Craft, a U.S.-based maritime and defense innovation company. He leads the company in its mission to deliver groundbreaking, non-ITAR, next-generation naval defense and coast guard vessels. Bo is also the founder of 1852 Solutions Ltd, an energy, maritime, and defense advisory firm providing expert advisory support to the offshore energy, maritime, and defense sectors.

Bo has over 20 years of leadership and advisory experience in offshore energy and maritime industries, including leading global maritime strategy and technology initiatives at Shell and BG Group. He is an Associate Fellow of the Nautical Institute (AFNI), a Lifetime Member of the Maritime Technical Society (MTS), a Member of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME), and a graduate of Massachusetts Maritime Academy, B.S. International Maritime Business. Bo also serves as an Industry Advisory Board member for the Marine Engineering Technology program at Texas A&M University at Galveston and as a confidential company advisor and board member to defense companies providing solutions for UAS, C-UXS, and naval combat logistics.  

For more information, get in touch with Bo directly at Bo.Jardine@eureka.navy.