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Navy’s LCS program advances

The second Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), USS Independence, has been launched after a complex operation in Mobile, Ala.

The ship first saw the sun April 26 when workers at Austal USA moved the striking, aluminum-hulled trimaran out of its building shed and onto a floating drydock. The 417-foot-long ship was balanced on its center section while stanchions steadied the outriggers covering the craft’s 100-foot beam.

The delicate transfer operation, which included properly aligning tracks on shore with the rented drydock, took longer than expected, and many spectators who gathered to watch the late-afternoon exercise left before dark, when the ship was moved fully into the dock.

While in the drydock, the ship’s mast — too tall to fit through the doors of the building shed — was installed.

On April 28, the floating drydock was towed out into Mobile Bay and sunk in a specially dredged area, and the Independence was finally floated off. Tugs returned the ship to her builder’s yard after nightfall.

The ship is expected to take about three years to build — about one year longer than intended in 2004, when the Navy awarded General Dynamics (GD) a construction contract for the ship. The keel-laying ceremony for the Independence was held in January 2006, and delivery now is planned for late this year.

“We are confident that we’ll deliver at the end of the year,” GD spokesman Kendell Pease said April 30.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin, GD’s competitor in the LCS program, marked an engineering milestone in late April when the USS Freedom’s two Fairbanks Morse diesel engines were run for the first time.

The Freedom, launched in September 2006, is being built at Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wis. Lockheed Martin hopes to move the ship under its own power during engineering trials in May, and is expected to deliver the ship to the Navy in late summer.

The Navy plans to test each design against the other and in 2010 select a winner. A total of 55 LCS ships are planned.