USNS Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193)

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Career
Glomar Explorer mothballed in Suisun Bay, CA - June 1993. (USGS - Terraserver)
Ordered:
Laid down:
Launched:	1 November 1972
Placed In Service:	1 July 1973
Placed Out of Service:
Fate:	Leased (not SAP)
Stricken:
General characteristics
Displacement:	50,500 tons full, 1780 tons light
Length:	188.6 m (619 ft)
Beam:	35.3 m (116 ft)
Draft:	14 m (46 ft)
Propulsion:	five Nordberg 16-cylinder diesel engines driving 4,160 V AC generators turning 6 x 2200 HPO (1.6 MW) DC shaft motors, twin shafts
Speed:	10 knots (19 km/h)

USNS Glomar Explorer (T-AG-193) is a large ship currently being used as a deep-sea drilling platform. The vessel was built for a secret operation, Project Jennifer, by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to recover a sunken Soviet submarine, K-129, which was lost in April 1968. [1]

The Hughes Glomar Explorer (HGE), as the ship was called at the time, was built between 1973 and 1974, by Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Co., at a cost in excess of $350 million. She set sail on June 20, 1974. Hughes told the media that the ship's purpose was to extract manganese nodules from the ocean floor. This marine geology cover story became surprisingly influential, spurring many others to examine the idea. But in sworn testimony in United States district court proceedings and in appearances before government agencies, Global Marine executives and others associated with the Hughes Glomar Explorer project unanimously maintained that the ship could not be used in any economically viable ocean mineral operation.

1 Project Jennifer
2 After Project Jennifer
3 The Glomar Explorer in fiction
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Project Jennifer

Main article: Project Jennifer

Since the K-129 had sunk in very deep water, a large ship was required for the recovery operation. However, such a vessel would easily be spotted by Soviet vessels, who might interfere with the operation and so an elaborate cover story was developed. The CIA contacted the businessman Howard Hughes, who agreed to assist.

While the ship did recover a portion of the vessel, a mechanical failure in the grapple caused half of the submarine to break off during recovery. This lost section is said to have held many of the more sought after items, including the code book and nuclear missiles. It was subsequently reported that two nuclear-tipped torpedoes and some cryptographic machines were recovered, along with the bodies of six Soviet submariners, who were subsequently given a formal burial at sea in a filmed ceremony.

There are claims from unofficial writers (who provide no documentation nor source data) that the material recovered by the Glomar Explorer included nuclear missiles and various codebooks. It has also been suggested, again by writers with no first hand knowledge, that contrary to the official account, nearly the entire submarine was recovered and that the official CIA account amounts to disinformation to give the impression of an unsuccessful mission.

The operation became public in February 1975 when the Los Angeles Times published a story about Project Jennifer, followed by news stories with additional details in other publications, including The New York Times.

[edit] After Project Jennifer

While everyone admired the ship's enormous lifting capacity, it seemed no one was much interested in operating the vessel because of her staggering cost. From March to June 1976, the General Services Administration (GSA) published advertisements inviting businesses to submit proposals for leasing the ship. By the end of four months, GSA had received a total of seven bids, including a $2.00 offer submitted by a Lincoln, Nebraska college student, and a $1.98 offer from a man who said he planned to seek a government contract to salvage the nuclear reactors of two United States submarines. The Lockheed Missile and Space Company submitted a 3 million dollar, two-year lease proposal contingent upon the company's ability to secure financing. But the GSA had already extended the bid deadline twice to allow Lockheed to find financial backers for its project without success and the agency concluded that there was no reason to believe Lockheed would find the funds in the near future.

Although the scientific community rallied to the defense of the Hughes Glomar Explorer, urging the president to maintain the ship as a national asset, no agency or department of the government wanted to assume the maintenance and operating cost. So in September of 1976, the GSA turned the Hughes Glomar Explorer over to the Navy for mothballing, and in January of 1977, after she was prepared for dry docking at a cost of more than two million dollars, the ship became part of the navy's Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet.

Then in September of 1978, a consortium called Ocean Minerals Company of Mountain View, California announced that it had leased the Hughes Glomar Explorer and that in November would begin testing a prototype deepsea mining system in the Pacific Ocean. The consortium included subsidiaries of the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, Royal Dutch Shell, and Bos Kalis Westminster Group NV of the Netherlands. Another partner, and the prime contractor, was the Lockheed Missile and Space Company.

In 1997, the ship was taken to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for modifications that converted her to a dynamically-positioned deep sea drilling ship, capable of drilling in waters of 7500 feet and, with some modification, up to 11,500 feet, which is 2,000 feet deeper than any other existing rig. The conversion cost over $180 million and was completed during the first quarter of 1998.

The conversion of the vessel in 1997 was the start of a 30-year lease from the U.S. Navy to Global Marine Drilling. Global Marine merged with Santa Fe International Corporation in 2001 to become GlobalSantaFe Corporation, which merged with Transocean Inc. in November 2007 and operates the vessel as the GSF Explorer.

The GSF Explorer is currently on hire to BP Angola drilling exploration and appraisal wells in Block 31.

[edit] The Glomar Explorer in fiction

In The Ghost from the Grand Banks, a 1990 science fiction novel written by Arthur C. Clarke, the Glomar Explorer is used in an effort to raise the Titanic on the 100th anniversary of her sinking.
Glomar Explorer also makes an appearance in the novel Shock Wave by Clive Cussler. It was used to dangle a modified satellite dish under the surface of the ocean to deflect a massive acoustic shockwave.
Glomar Explorer made another appearance in a Clive Cussler book. In the novel Fire Ice by Clive Cussler and Paul Kemprecos, a ship named the Ataman Explorer is compared to the Glomar Explorer in size and appearance.
Glomar Explorer is also mentioned in Tom Clancy's debut novel The Hunt for Red October where a Soviet Alfa class attack submarine sinks off the east coast of the U.S. and a Soviet intelligence officer thinks to himself of the likelihood of the reactivation of the "insidious" ship to recover it.
The Glomar Explorer plays a pivotal role in Charles Stross's novel, The Jennifer Morgue (Golden Gryphon Press), the second in a series set in a world where Lovecraftian gods exist and quantum mathematicians perform magick. The ship was used by a megalomaniac billionaire to raise an alien weapon from a Caribbean seabed in a rolling Bond parody, incurring the wrath of deep sea intelligences.
The Glomar Explorer is mentioned in reference to submarine recovery in “Seas of Crisis” by Joe Buff.