I had a very nice detailed model of her on my desk for years.
In my Dreamworld, It’d be Nice if some super-rich guy bought it, re-furbished it, and established a High Style, One Class (First, of course) transatlantic service for other Very Wealthy People — and everybody would dress formally for dinner; and they’d have all Top-Drawer Major “A” list entertainers in The Old Grand Style.
Crew and a few paying passengers could occupy the smaller cabins, but in All First-Class, Five-Star Service, I figure all the accomodations would be suites of several rooms going for $10,000 a day — or more.
I think it could pay out pretty quickly. (But nobody THAT rich reads these pages..)
So, I guess she’s to be lost... That’s a shame...
I think it would be less expensive to built a new ship of that size than trying to fix up the SS United States.
As pointed out in previous posts there were some discussions back in the early 1980’s to rebuilt the ship. I worked with several people in the maritime industry that wanted to sell cabins as condos and start sailing again.
The larger issue is that the SS United States was never built as a cruise ship; it was built as a passenger ship to carrry people from the United States to Europe.
It IS a shame, but I would suggest that the current state of the cruise industry has pretty much wrecked the possibility of any such concept. Fairly ordinary cruise ships are already very hoity toity inside, fully the equivalent of a high end hotel. And you can get cruises for little more than the ordinary cost of a medium-high end hotel. Cruises are actually pretty darn cheap.
Now I’m not gonna tell you I can say what the ultra-rich would want in such a thing, because I am not one of them. But it ain’t gonna be a big ship with the capacity for 5000 PAX. I could definitely see cruise ships repurposed to eldercare facilities. The ship I worked on, RCCL’s Jewel of the Seas for 10 months as a musician, had a fully equipped infirmary (and a morgue) but you can’t do surgery on a ship that can rock and roll. I would think that very rich people, when they want to go somewhere, they want to go at airplane speed. And when they want something, they want it now. Plus, rich people get bored and once you run out things to do on a cruise, you are nothing but bored. So if it’s not on the ship they have to wait. There ARE people who have booked permanent suites on cruise ships as their eldercare homes. There is one lady on the Queen Mary II who has an endowment of some kind that pays for her perpetual room & board there.
I could also see retired cruise ships working as homeless shelters. At least they could be hosed down when the occupants change.