The USS Intrepid fought in World War II, picked up astronauts from the sea and now sits on the Hudson River as a museum, with a spy plane, helicopters and a space shuttle on board.
Intrepid Museum logo used with permission. Abby's Labs is independent and was not paid for this story.
It was pouring with rain the day I visited the USS Intrepid in New York. That turned out to be perfect, because a wet, grey flight deck is probably what real sailors saw most of the time.
## A ship that is also a museum
The Intrepid is an aircraft carrier: a ship with a runway on top so planes can take off and land at sea. She was built for the United States Navy and launched in 1943, during World War II. She was hit by enemy planes and a torpedo, and was repaired every time, which is why some sailors called her "the Fighting I".
Later she had a very different job. In the 1960s she helped pick up astronauts from the Mercury and Gemini space missions after their capsules splashed down in the ocean. She retired in 1974 and opened as a museum on the Hudson River in 1982. Before you even get on board, there is a Concorde parked on the pier, the passenger jet that flew faster than sound and crossed the Atlantic in about three and a half hours.
## The fastest plane I have ever stood under
My favourite thing on the flight deck was the Lockheed A-12. It is long, flat and completely black, and it looks like something from a film. It was a secret spy plane built in the 1960s to fly so high and so fast that nothing could catch it: more than three times the speed of sound, about 25 kilometres up, near the edge of space.
It was painted black partly to help get rid of heat. At those speeds the air rubbing against the plane made the metal extremely hot, so it was built from titanium, which stays strong when it gets hot. It even leaked fuel on the ground, because its panels only sealed tightly once they had heated up and stretched in flight.
## Helicopters in a row
Further along the deck is a line of helicopters. The one I stood next to is a Bell UH-1, which everyone calls a "Huey". Hueys carried soldiers, supplies and injured people, and they became one of the most famous helicopters ever made. Helicopters matter on a carrier because they can land on a small space, rescue pilots from the sea and fly when planes cannot.
## Steering a ship the size of a street
Up in the island, the tower that sticks up from the side of the deck, you can visit the bridge. This is where the ship was steered. I held the wheel, which felt a bit silly because a real carrier is more than 250 metres long and takes a long time to turn. The person at the wheel did not decide where to go. They followed orders from the officer in charge, and the gauges around them showed speed, direction and what the engines were doing.
## A space shuttle on a warship
The last surprise is the space shuttle Enterprise, in its own pavilion on top of the ship. Enterprise never went to space. It was a test shuttle, used in the 1970s to check that a shuttle could glide and land safely after being carried up on the back of a jumbo jet. Everything the later shuttles did in space depended on those tests.
So in one wet afternoon I saw a World War II ship, a spy plane, a supersonic jet, a line of helicopters and a space shuttle. The rain did not matter at all.