The Hamburg Proving Grounds

The cold spring wind whipping off the Elbe River carried the sharp, industrial scent of cutting torches, wet iron, and river mud. Inside the vast covered drydock of the historic Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany—the legendary shipbuilding facility that had constructed transatlantic liners for a century and a half—the massive hull of the *Cross Atlantic* sat perched on drydock timber blocks, rising forty meters into the cavernous steel hangar like…