After 10 years of fundraising and permitting, a project has begun to sink a retired military ship off Key West, Fla., to serve as an artificial reef.

Last Friday, the decommissioned U.S. Air Force missile-tracking ship Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, a 523-foot ship that also monitored NASA space launches from 1963 to 1983, was towed from the James River Naval Reserve Fleet in Fort Eustis, Va., to Colonna's Shipyard in Norfolk, Va.

The ship also saw "action" as a film set in the 1999 movie "Virus," starring Jamie Lee Curtis and William Baldwin.

The ship is to become the second-largest vessel ever intentionally sunk to become an artificial reef, according to maritime and recreational diving experts. Currently, the largest ship ever scuttled for an artificial marine habitat is the USS Oriskany, an 888-foot Navy aircraft carrier sunk in May 2006 21 miles southeast of Pensacola, Fla. To date, the second-largest vessel, the 510-foot landing ship dock Spiegel Grove, was scuttled in May 2002 about six miles off Key Largo.

Artificial Reefs of the Keys has $3 million in commitments from two Monroe County government entities, a $1.3 million pledge from the City of Key West and other funding resources to help defray the estimated $5.7 million price tag to properly sink the ship, according to Joe Weatherby, the project's coordinator and founder of ARK.

Make-ready and cleansing is being coordinated by ReefMakers, and is expected to take about a year. The ship is slated for scuttling about six miles off Key West in spring 2008.

The proposed artificial reef is expected to attract marine life, provide ongoing positive impact to the tourism-based economy and benefit the underwater environment by taking recreational diving pressure off natural coral reefs. It will also serve as a sportfishing venue for anglers.

"She's an eye-popper and doesn't look like anything else out there," Weatherby said, noting the large electronic tracking dishes that are to be removed and then reinstalled on the ship before sinking. "Portions (of the ship) will come up to within 40 feet from the surface, making it a world-class dive."

For more information on the Vandenberg, dive into www.bigshipwrecks.com. More travel details on the Keys are available at www.fla-keys.com.