With all of the press coverage afforded to struggles to uncover our government’s secrets — like high-profile Freedom of Information Act requests for torture docs — t’s sometimes easy to forget that, occasionally, top secret stuff gets released through the lumbering of the bureaucratic process. Such is the case with Sea Shadow, the 164-foot stealth ship that remains the only vessel in American history designed to be invisible.The $50 million ship, 27 years after it started secretly gliding through the world’s waters, is now going to be sold for scrap, along with submersible barge it was ferried around in. How’s that for an anticlimactic ending to one of the most technologically-advanced ships every built?Like many other advanced projects pushed by the Pentagon, the Sea Shadow’s demise is due to the triple death blow of a lack of funding, utility, and further development. The Sea Shadow, unlike many other marvels that were simply axed, did get special treatment: the Navy spent the last six years trying to find a museum home for the ship, which looks like the hugely-popular F-117 Nighthawk.That didn’t succeed, and it’s become too costly to maintain the ship. So the Navy’s decided to pull the trigger on the final option: auction the ship for scrap. The top bid is in the hundreds of thousands, which isn’t such a bad deal for a $50 million ship, right? I mean, who wouldn’t want it as a pleasure craft? Can you imagine sipping champagne as you tool about on this puppy? Unfortunately, the government put the kibosh on that idea, stipulating that the ship must be scrapped.According to the Sacramento Bee,The stealth ship was actually built in sections by different contractors so that none would know its entire shape. The sections eventually had to be welded together, and as each became ready, it was lowered through the retractable roof on the barge. Then the roof was closed up tight again to avoid the prying eyes of Russian spy satellites arcing overhead.
Sea Shadow’s most notable design feature is its angular shape. Head-on, it looks like the letter “A” skimming across the water on its two splayed legs.
The design is a drastic departure: Virtually every other warship at sea has vertical sides to accommodate lots of crew and weapons. Sea Shadow’s sides tilt in toward each other, which restricts interior space – it has bunks for just 12 – but also scatters radar signals.The Bee also talked to S.K. Gupta, a former Lockheed engineer who was the last director of the Sea Shadow project. In a quote fitting the general badassery of the ship, Gupta told the Bee that “We operated with impunity. We could take anybody down at night.” The barge that hid the Sea Shadow during storage had equally impressive origins; it was originally designed to steal salvage a sunken Russian sub.Incredible history all around, and the Sea Shadow in particular represents the type of pie-in-the-sky engineering that was one of the good byproducts of the Cold War. Nowadays, with budget cuts coming hard and fast, and massive projects like the F-35 fighter jet delayed and bloated, it’s easy to understand why an old project like the Sea Shadow would have its support yanked, no matter how cool it is. What’s got me more worried is figuring out when (or if) the next ridiculously-advanced project will show up.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @drderekmead.
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The Sea Shadow inside of its dock.
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