 On 4 May 1998, Secretary of the Navy John H. Dalton signed the donation contract that transferred her to the nonprofit USS "Missouri" Memorial Association (MMA) of Honolulu, Hawaii.She was towed from Bremerton on 23 May to Astoria, Oregon, where she sat in fresh water at the mouth of the Columbia River to kill and drop the saltwater barnacles and sea grasses that had grown on her hull in Bremerton, then towed across the eastern Pacific, and docked at Ford Island, Pearl Harbor on 22 June, just from the "Arizona" Memorial.Less than a year later, on 29 January 1999, "Missouri" was opened as a museum operated by the MMA.