Just over 60 yeas ago, on September 30, 1954, USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear powered submarine was commissioned in New London, Connecticut. Following commissioning she continued trials and testing, until she put to sea for the first time on January 17, 1955 and signaled her historic message: “Underway on nuclear power.” USS Nautilus was also the first submarine to complete a submerged transit to the North Pole on 3 August 1958.
What made the Nautilus unique was her nuclear reactor, the first to be put on a submarine. Initial testing of the reactor was done, not on the ship, but at a top secret Navy facility, hundreds of miles from the ocean in the high desert of Idaho. Recently the Atlantic Monthly re-posted an article from 1959, by Commander E. E. Kintner, a Navy officer closely involved with the testing. The overall project was managed by then Captain Rickover. From Admiral Rickover’s Gamble:
The hospital ship Jubilee Hope was recently 
Last May 
A waka, a 600 year voyaging canoe, was recently found on the New Zealand’s South Island’s West Coast. The results of a study by University of Auckland researchers appeared recently in the 
In September, we posted about the discovery of one of two missing ships from the 
Just over a year ago, I was surprised — shocked might be a better word — to hear of a play about a shipyard. 
In 2011, we 
The oceans could indeed be older than the sun. A team of scientists from the University of Michigan now believe that up to half the water on our planet is older than the sun. Earlier theories had assumed that interstellar ice particles evaporated with the formation of Earth and reformed later to create the oceans. Now, these scientists have calculated that if the old theory was valid, that the amount of deuterium found in terrestrial water would be far lower than it is. Deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen that has an extra neutron attached. The only explanation they have found for the higher levels of deuterium observed is if more of the interstellar ice particles helped form the world’s oceans directly. They calculate that as much as 50% of the earth’s water might come from these ice particles, which have higher levels of deuterium. This might suggest that water on distant planets is far more common than previously thought.
The schooner yacht 
The main mast on the 
Two years ago 
The topsail schooner 
The passenger steamer