Transport and Trade 



Meteorological satellites that provide weather information for ship routing 

 may before long permit the sensing and direct transmission of data on 

 weather fronts.* 



The safety of small craft at sea is jeopardized by drift, as the tides, cur- 

 rents, and winds combine to move vessels in unintended directions. Informa- 

 tion developed by the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, the Navy, and other 

 Federal and non-Federal agencies, has been used by the Coast Guard in pre- 

 paring drift tables, which are being continually refined as further experi- 

 ments are conducted. 



Another important safety measure is the establishment of sea lanes de- 

 signed like divided highways to reduce the incidence of collision in areas of 

 heavy traffic. The Federal Government, assisted by the maritime industry, 

 has established such lanes at the approaches to New York Harbor and Dela- 

 ware Bay and has approved sea lanes for the approaches to San Francisco 

 Bay. Studies are in progress for the Chesapeake Bay area and are proposed 

 for Cook Inlet, Alaska. An analogous action in the Gulf of Mexico — under- 

 taken by the Corps of Engineers, ESSA, and Coast Guard in cooperation 

 with the shipping industry and the offshore mineral industry' — has led to 

 establishment and charting of "fairways" leading to the principal ports of the 

 Gulf in which the erection of structures is not permitted. 



The Coast Guard now has programs in 55 ports for control of movement 

 of vessels within navigable waters, ranging from requiring notice of arrival 

 to escorting vessels which pose high hazards (for example, those transporting 

 explosives). 



Technology for Maritime Cost Reduction 



Based on the analysis of the shipping system outlined earlier, current pro- 

 grams for the application of new vessel and cargo handling technology are 

 focused on two general problems: first, improvements of the port-ship sys- 

 tem will result in greater efficiency of cargo handling operations, provide the 

 opportunity for reduced port facility space requirements, and make possible 

 shorter turn-around times; second, improvements in ship design will pro- 



^ Five agencies are cooperating in developing design specifications for a naviga- 

 tional and traffic control satellite system with the principal goal of relatively simple, 

 low cost aircraft and shipboard transp>onder installations. The agencies are the Na- 

 tional Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Departments of Commerce, 

 Defense, Transportation and Interior. NASA will be conducting engineering tests of 

 two separate satellite position location experiments in 1968, i.e., the Interrogation, 

 Recording, and Location System (IRLS) on Nimbus B. and the Omega Position 

 Location Experiment (OPLE) on the ATS satellite. The latter system operates in 

 conjunction with the Navy's OMEGA stations. 



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