Kyle Mizokami
In the summer of 2021, the United States Navy did the unthinkable: it attacked one of its own warships. It anchored the brand-new aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford off the East Coast and subjected it to a series of underwater explosions, culminating in a whopping 40,000 pounds of TNT hammering the ship’s hull. The tests were designed to ensure that Ford could protect its crew of 5,000 sailors—more than the total number of servicemen who died during the attack on Pearl Harbor.
For more than eighty years, the U.S. Navy has operated the world’s largest and most powerful fleet of aircraft carriers; its 11 ships carry more that 400 fighter jets and have a combined crew of more than 55,000 sailors. The bulk of the fleet consists of 10 Nimitz-class carriers built between the 1960s and 1990s. By the 2000s, it was clear Nimitz’s 50s-era design was holding back the adoption of modern technologies. Nimitz used steam catapults to launch aircraft, a system that involved routing steam through large, unwieldy pipes from the boilers to reservoirs just under the flight deck. And the ships used an older Westinghouse A4W nuclear reactor design that took up more room inside the ship than newer-generation reactors and could not support the growing power needs of carriers, especially as computers, sensors, and future directed energy weapons added additional energy demands.
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