MV Liberty Star
American ship built in 1981
MV Liberty Star is a formerly NASA-owned and United Space Alliance-operated vessel which primarily served as an SRB recovery ship following the launch of Space Shuttle missions. It also performed tugboat duties and acted as a research platform. In 2012, it was transferred to the U.S. Department of Transportation for use as a training vessel at the United States Merchant Marine Academy as the T/V Kings Pointer. Her sister ship is the MV Freedom Star.
History
The recovery ships were built at Atlantic Marine Shipyard on Fort George Island, Florida, and delivered in January 1981 to their original owner, United Technologies Corporation. As well as recovering the Space Shuttle, SRB's Liberty Star has since 1998 been used to tow the Space Shuttle external fuel tanks from their assembly plant at Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans, Louisiana, to the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. She served a similar role in recovering the first test flight of the Ares I and was anticipated to continue recovering boosters for the Constellation program before it was canceled in 2010.
The Liberty Star underwent special strengthening enhancements to withstand the greater burden of towing the external fuel tanks. The stern was strengthened at critical points, new bulwark fairings were added, and an H-bitt was installed through which cabling is threaded to keep it centered during towing operations. Also installed was a hydraulic towing winch, referred to as a double-drum waterfall winch, holding 2,000 feet (610 m) or more of wire rope on each drum.
“MV Liberty Star” enters the record as american ship built in 1981. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Liberty, Star and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“MV Liberty Star” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Liberty, Star and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3237812. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2012, 1981, 1998 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “MV Liberty Star” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.