ST IV Ship at Final Frontier

The USS Ranger is heading to her final frontier... a scrap yard in Texas. It's the sad, but inevitable fate of the great ship, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier that was commissioned in 1957, saw action from the Vietnam War to Operation Desert Storm, and which doubled as the USS Enterprise in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Yes, think "Nuclear wessels."

In addition to The Voyage Home, portions of  the Tom Cruise blockbuster Top Gun were filmed aboard the Ranger. The ship, which was decommissioned in 1993, earlier this month began its last trek, a  five-month, 16,000-mile journey from Puget Sound, around South America—because it can't squeeze through the Panama Canal—to International Shipbreaking, the scrap yard in Brownsville, Texas.