However, no viable applications were received and the vessel was removed from donation hold in December 2003 and redesignated for disposal. All Star Metals will now develop its final tow plan for the Navy's approval for the tow of ex-Forrestal from its current berth at the Navy's inactive ship facility in Philadelphia to All Star Metals' facility in Brownsville. The price of the delivery order reflects the net price proposed by All Star Metals, which considered the estimated proceeds from the sale of the scrap metal to be generated from dismantling. The first of the "supercarriers," Forrestal was launched Dec. 11, 1954, by Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co., and commissioned Sept. 29, 1955. The award of contracts for two additional conventional carriers - ex-Saratoga (CV 60) and ex-Constellation (CV 64) - are pending, as they are contingent upon the two other successful offerors receiving their facility security clearances.
– A supercarrier once hailed as the "biggest ship ever built" has been sold—for a price that must rank among the smallest ever: one penny, paid by the seller. All Star Metals now owns the historic USS Forrestal after the Pentagon paid it one cent to dismantle and recycle it; the company will tow the 1,067-foot ship to its facility in Brownsville, Texas, where it will be scrapped. Though the ship has a long history—launched in 1954, it was the Navy's first supercarrier, and was the site of a Vietnam War tragedy—the Navy got no "viable applications" during its attempt to hand it to a museum or have it made into a memorial, Fox News reports. In the end, maintenance on the ship, which cost $217 million to build (more like $2 billion in today's dollars) and was decommissioned in 1993, became just too costly. The Navy was "caught between a rock and a hard place," says a USS Forrestal Association historian and survivor of the 1967 incident, which saw an A-4 Skyhawk struck by an accidentally-launched rocket, causing a chain reaction of blasts and blazes that killed 134 and injured hundreds more. A high-profile survivor? The man in the cockpit of that A-4 Skyhawk, one John McCain.