Project to sink military ship begins After 10 years of fund-raising and getting permits, a project has begun to sink a retired military ship off Key West 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 1963-83, 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 intentionally sunk to become an artificial reef, according to maritime and recreational diving experts.