BATH — Overnight Thursday into Friday morning, cranes at Bath Iron Works lifted the 900-ton deckhouse of the future USS Michael Monsoor and lowered it carefully onto the hull of the second Zumwalt-class “stealth” guided-missile destroyer built by BIW for the U.S. Navy.
The 155-foot-long, 60-foot-high composite deckhouse, built by Huntington Ingalls Industries in Gulfport, Mississippi, arrived by barge in September. After inspection, the barge and deckhouse were moved into BIW’s drydock last week, and this week, the hull was moved forward on the Land-Level Transfer Facility, shipyard spokesman Matt Wickenheiser said Friday.
“We lowered the deckhouse carefully onto the hull, secured it and began to translate the ship back into its construction space [Friday],” Wickenheiser said in an email. “All in all, I’m told the roughly 10-hour move went very, very well.”
In December 2012, the deckhouse of the DDG 1000 — the USS Zumwalt — was lifted into that ship’s hull.
At the time, Cmdr. Brian Metcalf, the Navy’s on-site DDG 1000 program manager at BIW, said the lift was a feat on a scale that has happened few times in the history of American shipbuilding, and probably never before in the construction of sea-surface combatants.
Like the DDG 1000, or USS Zumwalt, the nearly $4 billion DDG 1001 boasts a futuristic design and technology aimed at providing the Navy with advanced missile and gun support for shallow water and land attacks.
Bath Iron Works is building three DDG 1000s for the Navy, which truncated the line after deeming construction costs to be too high.
The ships, at 610 feet long, are the “most complex surface combatants the U.S. Navy has ever developed,” Zumwalt class program manager Capt. Jim Downey said in October 2013, as the USS Zumwalt was prepared for launching into the Kennebec River. That ship was christened in April.
The DDG 1001 is scheduled for delivery to the Navy in early 2015, and the third stealth destroyer, the DDG 1002, to be named the USS Lyndon B. Johnson, is due in 2018.
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- The 900-ton deckhouse of the future USS Michael Monsoor (DDG 1001) was lifted onto the hull overnight Thursday at Bath Iron Works.
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