USS Texas (BB-35) sits under floodlights in a Galveston dry dock, midway through the most extensive rebuild of her 110-plus year life. She is the last dreadnought battleship left on Earth, and the only ship in the world to have fought in both World Wars. From the North Sea in 1918 to the invasion beaches of Normandy and Southern France in 1944, then on to Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945, Texas carried her crew through nearly every major amphibious campaign of the Atlantic and Pacific without ever hauling down her flag. She lost just one sailor to enemy fire across all of it. Few remember that Texas was also a technological pioneer. She was the first U.S. battleship built with 14-inch guns, the first to mount anti-aircraft weapons, the first to launch an aircraft, and among the earliest warships in the Navy to carry radar. By the time she was decommissioned on April 21, 1948, she had already rewritten the rules of naval gunnery twice over. That same day, Texas became something else entirely: the first battleship in the world preserved as a permanent museum ship. Every battlewagon that followed her into retirement — Alabama, North Carolina, Massachusetts, the Iowa-class ships — did so because Texas proved it could be done first. This photo, taken in October 2022 at Gulf Copper's Galveston yard, captures her a few weeks into a rebuild that would eventually replace over 700 tons of steel and consume more than 400,000 labor hours. Decades of corrosion at her old berth near San Jacinto had left her listing hard to starboard; without this dry dock, she likely wouldn't have survived another decade afloat. She's since been refloated, and the Battleship Texas Foundation has secured her a permanent new home at Pier 15 in the Port of Galveston, with a public reopening targeted for late 2026. After more than a century, America's first battleship museum is finally getting the one thing she never had — a home built to last.