The Big "E" pulls the pin and retires...
 

USS Enterprise carrier taken out of active service - Yahoo! News

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Tip of the spear indeed. Quite a run. Not knowing the details of carrier utilization, I'm curious how this will impact the fleet until the next new one in 2015.

Sad to see but have you seen the announcement of the new Enterprise! Its on the drawing boards right now!

Carrier ENTERPRISE (CVN 65) leaves the Fleet, but the name lives on

I know that the Enterprise is over 50 but I'm curious to know as to what factors made them decommission her as opposed to a major tear down and rebuild.

Is the new ship a radical hull design change or is the hull so stressed that it wouldn't be seaworthy?

I would guess her age and the cost of refueling are just a couple of the factors. Nothing lasts forever.

At over $4.5 Billion for a Nimitz class....you'd think that re-using a hull would be a consideration.....IF it was within specs.

When I was in the Navy I heard it costs a couple billion just to refuel. Don't know if thats true but I am sure it's not cheap. Some other class ships are only in service for 20 years or so. Some of the Aegis cruisers are being decommissioned all ready. You should see what these ships look like after just one deployment. I can't imagine what condition this ship is in after 50 years even after all the overhauls she has had.

Well, I spent the years from '69 to '73 on there and we thought it was worn out then. Here are some of the possible issues. The propeller shafts/propellers/reduction gears all have a finite life. I know of twice the whole "drive train" was pulled out, shafts cleaned (all coating removed), gears pulled and all bearing done over. I seriously doubt there are any machinists in the Navy, nuclear or otherwise that have ever done that. We did it twice on ships I was on. Next are the reactor plant components and the Big E has 8 reactors which was a "nuclear copy" of the steam plant of the CV64. When I went on the CV64 Tiger cruise, the engines and all other components were in exactly the same place. The Big E has a big bulkhead to separate the reactor side from the steam side. Since there are not any ships now with that reactor design, spare parts are soft of hard to come by. Sort of like a 901 gear box! Next is probably the electronics as it has been updated several times but I doubt that even with all the turbine generators they could not make enough power, plus all the additional cooling, etc. The biggest reason are the reactor cores as they are the old 150MW single pass design and the new carriers use one very large reactor where the Big E uses 4 so again parts are not there and it is sort of hard to fine those fuel cells!