The Big E is underway one last time. This time, the tugs are doing the work.

The former USS Enterprise (CVN-65) left Newport News Shipbuilding on Nov. 2, bound for Mobile, Ala., and the scrapyard. The world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is headed for dismantling after more than half a century of service and nearly 14 years out of operations.

Commissioned in 1961, Enterprise served through the Cold War, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq. But a carrier’s record belongs to more than the admirals who commanded it. It belongs to the sailors who worked the flight deck, maintained the aircraft, stood watch over the reactors and fed a floating town.

They made the steel count.

Enterprise stopped operating in December 2012. The Navy formally decommissioned it in February 2017, and removal of its nuclear fuel was completed that year.

Then came the long business of figuring out how to take it apart.

NorthStar Maritime Dismantlement Services won a $418.5 million contract in July to dismantle, recycle and dispose of the ship. Completion is expected by September 2030. Hazardous materials, including low-level radioactive waste, must go to licensed disposal sites.

Even getting to the scrapyard required a fight through the contracting system. Huntington Ingalls Industries, the parent company of Newport News Shipbuilding, dropped its challenge to NorthStar’s award in October.

Now comes the hard industrial work. Enterprise carried eight reactors. Removing their fuel did not make the remaining plants ordinary scrap. Workers must dismantle the ship and handle its radioactive components—a job whose lessons will help guide disposal of the nuclear carriers coming behind it.

There is no dishonor in wearing out a warship. Ships have working lives. So do the people who keep them ready. Enterprise gave the country decades.

The name will sail again aboard the future Enterprise, CVN-80.

For CVN-65, the orders are simpler now: tow south, tie up, and begin cutting.

For the sailors who served aboard, that last part will be the hardest to watch.