What a research vessel charter costs
Crewed research vessel hire typically runs to £25,000-£50,000 per day once crew, fuel, mobilisation and equipment are counted, and the data stops the moment the ship leaves station. For continuous coverage you pay for every day at sea, plus weather days and transit. For most monitoring programmes the limiting factor is not the science, it is ship time.
What you get instead
A Scout USV is a 2.4 m, 80 kg solar-electric autonomous surface vehicle that stays on station for 6+ months, collecting data continuously in all weather. It carries your sensors above and below the surface, delivers quality-controlled data by satellite to a dashboard or API, and can be repositioned at any time. One person launches it from a slipway, beach or boat, large or small, and Scout then transits to station under its own power, even thousands of miles offshore, so there is no crew, fuel, port or support vessel to charter just to reach the site.
When a ship still makes sense
A crewed vessel is the right tool when you need to recover heavy seabed equipment, run over-the-side operations that require a deck and crane, or carry scientists offshore to work hands-on. An autonomous USV is the better tool for persistent, repeatable measurement: long time series, wide-area transects, station-keeping at a fixed point, and harvesting data from instruments you have already deployed on the seabed.
Own it or task us
Buy a Scout to run within your group from £40,000, or take it fully managed as data-as-a-service: done-for-you deployments with no upfront cost, and quality-controlled data delivered straight to your own cloud. For the price of a few days of ship time, you can put a platform in the water for months. See how it compares with a moored buoy and the wider ocean data collection methods, or the ocean robotics glossary.