Up until this point, I have drawn my ‘hiiden gems’ from the military assets in the region. I started with the Coast Guard, moved to Naval Base Ventura County, and then I wrote about the three tenant commands that are also federal Science and Technology Reinvention Laboratory. (Recall that they are the Naval Surface Warfare Center - Port Hueneme Division. In this post, I begins to edge out from behind the Department of Defense fence line that protects the previous examples to write about Fathomwerx.

Located just outside the DOD fenceline but inside a Department of Homeland Security fenceline that protects the commercial Port of Hueneme, Fathomwerx is hard to describe. On paper, Fathomwerx is a partnership between six organizations: the three federal laboratories at NBVC, the commercial port of Hueneme, the Economic Development Cooperative of Ventura County, and a private technology firm called Matter Labs. They work together to make Fathomwerx an entity that, according to it web page,

[Serves] as a public-private laboratory, community, and resource for technological innovation, the partners strive to fuse small and non-traditional companies, academic institutions, and other Department of Defense stakeholders together to work on the most challenging problems in military, port, and maritime domains.

The Fathomwerx ‘laboratory’ is their industrial-sized makerspace facility at the Port of Hueneme. Here, people who share with Fathomwerx an interest in the same types of challenges come together to collaborate on imagining and prototyping solutions. The DHS fenceline is much easier to cross than ther NBVC fenceline (i.e., anyone, regardless of nationality, who has an official ID and a DHS-recognized escort can come into the port), so Fathomwerx is absolutely more accessible to the public. As a result, all the work at Fathomwerx is unclassified; anything that needs to be classified can be pursued at the Fathomwerx Innovation Lab that’s on base near the NSWC-PHD command center.

Fathomwerx means different things to different people. The engineers of the Navy commands, who are solving important problems facing the fleet, see Fathomwerx as a place where they can prototype solutions immediately without the bureaucratic wait required by their machine shops. It’s true that the engineer must do to their own work at Fathomwerx, but many see that as a benefit to having Fathomwerx in their back yard. Public safety professionals of regional cities and counties see Fathomwerx as an agent that allows them to engage with their counterparts to explore creative solutions to maritime-related safety problems and to practice techniques for dealing with new challenges. This kind of work happens every year under the umbrella of the Advanced Naval Technology Exercises - Coastal Trident program. I plan on giving Coast Trident its own ‘hidden gems’ post, soon.

It’s commitments to creative problems solving and to cutting across organizational silos are baked into Fathomwerx’s DNA. Fathomwerx started life in 1999 as the Center for Asymmetric Warfare(CAW) at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey Bay, CA. It separated from NPS in 2015 and attached itself to NSWC-PHD. Soon, it created (and transformed into) the Maritine Applied Science and Technology (MAST) lab at the Port of Hueneme. It’s innovative mission attracted organizations that are now the Fathomwerx partners who united under the Fathomwerx trademark. My next post will illuminate Fathomwerx’s devotion to innovation and will suggest why we neighbors should look toward Fathomwerx if we want to find opportunities for economic development in the region.

Let me know if you have any questions about the federal laboratories and the privileges that let regional partners leverage laboratories for regional Good. If you have pointers for non-military ‘gems’ in the region, let me know about them. You can find me on Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Bluesky.

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