Top Gun Aircraft Carrier Scrapped for a Penny

Ah, another great use of our tax dollars, or maybe we should make that tax "cents" instead.

Remember "Top Gun?" Of course you do! Well, Tom Cruise's favorite aircraft carrier, the USS Ranger, the one he was featured in when he made the movie, "Top Gun," has been scrapped by the Navy. Some people wanted to set it up as a museum but they couldn't raise the money, so the Navy has sold it for, are you ready? One penny! What a deal! I would have given them twice that, although I'm not sure what I would have done with a 66,000 ton doorstop.

The massive ship has been sitting in Bremerton, Washington, for about 8 years waiting for donations to pour in for the museum, but they needed about $35 million to set everything up and raised only about $100,000, so that idea was out.

The Ranger is one of only four Forrestal-class carriers the Navy completed. Built in 1957, the ship served extensively in the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm until being decommissioned in 1993.

The folks who'll be tearing it down for scrap, All Star Metals, are having it towed to their facility in Brownsville, Texas. That will take something like 5 months since they'll have to take it around the tip of South America through the Straits of Magellan, since it's too big to go through the Panama Canal.