Still afloat, but nobody can find a use for the ship. Not for lack of trying.
"You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her." — William Francis Gibbs.
The S.S. United States was built to warship standards, and could be used as a troop ship. Multiple engine rooms, many watertight compartments, few large interior spaces, and high speed. Look at cruise ships today. Those things are resort hotels that float. Huge open interior spaces. Open decks and pools. That's what people want. Not plowing across the Atlantic at a speed where you don't go on deck without a good reason.
More space to flood with a single hole. Military ships (and I assume the SS United States) have water tight doors between the compartments and the compartment are not oversized for the purpose they serve.
> I knew about it because my father was a naval architect by education and he had
a machine shop and he built the watertight doors the SS United States
> The U.S. government also realized the value of having luxury liners that could be converted into troop ships, as the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth had done during the war. When the military conflict in Korea escalated in the late 1940s, the US government agreed to subsidize a large part of the new liner’s cost and operating expenses, with the understanding that it could be requisitioned for military purposes.
> ...
> Dry dock construction was not Gibbs’ only introduction of new shipbuilding techniques for the United States. The design incorporated the most rigid U.S. Navy standards, including strict compartmentalization to combat flooding, and dual engine rooms to provide power in case one was immobilized. The low and graceful superstructure was built entirely in aluminum, which gave the ship a dead weight of 45,400 long tons, compared to the 77,000 long tons for the similarly sized Cunard Queens.
>The low and graceful superstructure was built entirely in aluminum
Interesting, apparently no lessons were learned back then on disparate metal shipbuilding because the US still has problems with aluminum in shipbuilding to this day.
They knew about the problems (and the lack of solutions). Making it out of aluminum was a statement of the wealth of the nation - very much in the same way that the cap of the Washington Monument being made out of aluminum was.
Battleship New Jersey's First Hull Leak (not aluminum, same problems - made a decade before the SS United States) - https://youtu.be/DtNVAz_moAk
"You can’t set her on fire, you can’t sink her, and you can’t catch her." — William Francis Gibbs.
The S.S. United States was built to warship standards, and could be used as a troop ship. Multiple engine rooms, many watertight compartments, few large interior spaces, and high speed. Look at cruise ships today. Those things are resort hotels that float. Huge open interior spaces. Open decks and pools. That's what people want. Not plowing across the Atlantic at a speed where you don't go on deck without a good reason.