[2] Kingsport Victory was immediately placed in operation by the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company, under a War Shipping Administration general agency agreement, supplying troops in the Pacific.

After the war, in December 1945 she steamed from Okinawa to Hong Kong, then Calcutta; through the Suez Canal she arrived at New York City on 27 February 1946.

[3] On 8 April 1948 the ship was taken out of reserve and bareboat chartered to the War Department for operation as the USAT ''Kingsport Victory a US Army Transport.

Kingsport Victory is seen in an Air Force documentary film on the construction of the Dew Line loading supplies at Norfolk, Virginia and unloading at Halifax, Nova Scotia.

After conversion from satellite configuration, particularly removal of the large and very visible dome, Kingsport was engaged in acoustic work for the Navy supporting undersea surveillance programs.

On 24 September 1961, she was delivered to the Portland, Oregon facilities of Willamette Iron & Steel Company where she underwent conversion to become the first satellite communications ship.

Housed in a 53-foot, plastic, air-pressurized radome, this antenna permitted precision tracking of a high altitude satellite at any angle above the horizon.

[1] Kingsport sailed to Lagos, Nigeria after Syncom 2 had been successfully launched on 26 July 1963 to serve as the terminal control station during testing and evaluation of the satellite.

[1] On 23 August 1963, President John F. Kennedy in Washington, D.C., telephoned Nigerian Prime Minister Abubakar Balewa aboard the Kingsport docked in Lagos Harbor via Syncom 2, the first geosynchronous communication satellite.

For the next ten months the ship operated between Pearl Harbor and Guam supporting further communication experiments including those related to the evaluation of SYNCOM 3 after its launching 19 August 1964.

[16][17][18] The ship was part of the "Caeasr fleet" under the technical control of the project's Program Manager, then Naval Electronics Systems Command (NAVELEX PME-124).

[19] Among the now published reports, declassified in 2006, of the ship's work is a description of the Indian Ocean exercise code named BEARING STAKE that took place from January to April 1977.