Original Stealth Ship Sold for Scrap

Once-classified Navy stealth ship 'Sea Shadow' has been sold to an Alameda shipyard for scrapping

The $2.5 million bid from Bay Ship & Yacht Co. won the federal government auction. The firm was interested not so much in the space-age stealth ship but the barge that houses it, which will be converted into a drydock, reports 'The Sacramento Bee'.

Sea Shadow was built in 1985 by Lockheed Martin in Redwood City, under contract with the U.S. Navy, for a price of $50 million. The goal was to test whether radar-evading technology proven in fighter aircraft could also be applied to ships.

The experiment was a success. Sea Shadow proved in exercises that it could sneak up on aircraft carriers undetected.

After trying unsuccessfully to give Sea Shadow away to a museum, the Navy decided earlier this year to sell it for its scrap value alone. It was offered with a unique submersible barge, known as HMB-1, which was originally built for a CIA mission in 1974 to retrieve a sunken Russian submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean and later became Sea Shadow's garage.