With the the world’s first nuclear aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, set to retire tomorrow after 50 straight years of Navy service, Huntington-Ingalls Industries — which owns the Newport News Shipyard where all Navy carriers are built — has put together an eye-catching graphic that sums up the big ship’s size and history (click here for the humongous full-size version).

The strategic downside of this stirring saga is that the Enterprise‘s high-tech replacement, the USS Gerald Ford, won’t be finished until 2015. That means the Navy will be short a carrier even as tensions rise simultaneously in the Gulf, with Iran, and in the Western Pacific, with China, spreading the fleet thin. Enterprise, we’re really going to miss you.