Bollinger Shipyards has laid the keel of the future USNS Lenni Lenape, the ninth Navajo-class towing, salvage and rescue ship (T-ATS) ordered by the US Navy.
The future Lenni Lenape is also the sixth Navajo-class T-ATS to be built by Bollinger. She is also the first US Navy vessel to carry the name of the Lenni Lenape tribe of Pennsylvania, which was the first tribe to sign a treaty with the United States in 1778.
The Navajo-class ships are named after prominent Native Americans or Native American tribes and will replace and fulfill the capabilities that were previously provided by the navy’s Powhatan-class fleet ocean tugs and Safeguard-class rescue and salvage ships.
The T-ATS will boast a multi-mission common hull platform capable of open-ocean towing of heavy ships. This will also enable the vessel to support a variety of other missions such as salvage, oil spill response, humanitarian assistance, search and rescue (including rescue of crews of distressed submarines), and wide-area search and surveillance operations using unmanned underwater vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Upon completion, the future Lenni Lenape will have a length of 263 feet (80.2 metres), a beam of 59 feet (18 metres), a draught of 17.7 feet (5.39 metres), a depth of 24.6 feet (7.5 metres), space for 23 crewmembers and up to 42 additional personnel, and 6,000 square feet (600 square metres) of deck space for embarked systems.
The large, unobstructed deck will allow for the embarkation of a variety of mission-specific, stand-alone and interchangeable systems such as modular and containerised payloads.
