[dsfyu404ed]

>Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?

Organizations with more lucrative things to spend their man hours on tend to let abandoned projects just sit rather then liquidate them because the ROI of whatever they usually do is better than the ROI of liquidating a failed project. Property tax and other upkeep costs often wind up buried somewhere in a long list of similar costs from all the other real-estate the organization owns or leases or has to otherwise pay for. Things tend to finally get liquidated when a property needs to be sold or turned over like happened here.

[ryandrake]

Same mentality behind why each of us have a box of old VGA cards, 8MB RAM modules, and serial cables still in our closets that we haven't touched in years. You could sell them on eBay or Craigslist but for $0.50 per cable why bother?