BREMERTON — At the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, workers are preparing to transplant the nose of a retiring submarine — the USS Honolulu — onto the USS San Francisco, which was damaged when it ran into an undersea mountain in 2005.
“A bow replacement on an operational hull is unique and has never been accomplished before,” said Pat Dolan, a spokeswoman for Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C.
The operation, scheduled to begin in November, will take nearly two years to complete and is expected to save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.