Cargo

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

A science experiment designed by a Charles County high school junior is part of the cargo aboard Dragon, the space capsule NASA and the SpaceX Corporation sent into orbit early Tuesday, and is on its way to the International Space Station as part of the historic flight, according to NASA. Paul Warren, an 11th-grader at Henry E. Lackey High School in Indian Head, Md., conceived of the experiment, a series of tests that will allow investigators to measure the effects of weightlessness and higher-than-normal radiation on the growth of roundworms.

As German forces overran Europe in the spring of 1940, massive gold shipments began arriving in the United States from England, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway for safekeeping. As the May invasion of Oslo began, Norwegian officials played a cat and mouse game with some 600,000,000 kronor, which they successfully managed to spirit away from the Nazis aboard a British troopship and deposit in a London bank vault. The next month, a shipment of gold estimated to be in excess of $500 million arrived in New York from England and France, shipped by way of Canada.

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

As a local business owner, I was happy for the opportunity to participate in the recent public meeting to discuss the proposed Baltimore Washington Rail Facility. While I agree that it is incredibly important to continue this discussion openly, I hope residents of our community will not lose sight of how important this facility can be to our local economy. In addition to driving economic growth, providing additional tax income to our local governments, and creating jobs, as a business owner, I see an even more important benefit.

William S. Ansley Jr. has moved cadavers from India to a Georgia medical school, sent radar installations over the Trans-Siberian Railroad into Mongolia and delivered aluminum moldings for houses into war-torn Beirut, Lebanon.On the high seas, Mr. Ansley is a travel agent for cargo, a customs broker and freight forwarder. It is his job to see that cargo reaches its ultimate destination by connecting through a complex labyrinth of ships, trains, trucks or planes.It is a career that has spanned more than two dozen years for Mr. Ansley, who was recently named president of Samuel Shapiro & Co. Inc., Baltimore's oldest customs broker and freight forwarding firm.

The Mediterranean Shipping Co. will increase by several thousand containers the cargo it moves through the port of Baltimore under an agreement announced yesterday with the Maryland Port Administration.The agreement gives the company special rates for cargo moved through the Seagirt Marine Terminal to and from southern and western destinations. The increased business in the port stems largely from improved rail service at the 2-year-old Seagirt terminal.Last year, the CSX Corp., one of two major railroads serving Baltimore, opened a rail yard at Seagirt as it closed its Potomac Yards facilities in Alexandria, Va. That will enable companies like Mediterranean to ship more cheaply by rail directly from the port, rather than trucking cargo first to Alexandria.

The Port of Baltimore enters the year hoping to continue its steady growth in cargo by capitalizing on last year's agreements liberalizing world trade.Both the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade accord are expected to increase trade in Baltimore and elsewhere by significantly reducing or eliminating tariffs."We're anticipating a positive impact at the port of Baltimore," said Michael P. Angelos, executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, which oversees the state's five public marine terminals.

Developers of a subsidized cargo-handling facility at the Port of Baltimore hope the so-called "Container Freight Station" will provide employment for unionized longshoremen who've lost work in recent years.The facility will use members of the International Longshoremen's Association to load and unload cargo from standardized shipping containers. Their wages will be subsidized by a 30-cent-per-ton cargo assessment charged at all ILA ports.The subsidy is to help reduce the higher costs of using unionized labor and make it competitive with non-union stations operating off-pier.

One of the lessons learned in the Persian Gulf war was the importance of airlift -- the ability to pack a cargo plane with military gear and respond to a crisis anywhere in the world on very short notice.The plane the Air Force is counting on to perform such missions in the future is the C-17, and its development is moving ahead even as the Defense Department is slashing other programs. That bodes well for McDonnell Douglas Corp., the plane's prime contractor, and the Martin Marietta Corp.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is urging CSX Transportation to find a site in the city for its multi-million dollar cargo transfer center rather than look for a site in suburbs to the south. In a letter to CSX President and CEO Michael J. Ward released Thursday, the mayor said she was "deeply troubled" that plans for the Baltimore-Washington Rail Intermodal Facility have stalled and expressed concern that if a new rail yard was not completed soon, "economic opportunity will pass us by. " The truck-to-rail center would allow CSX to bypass the narrow, century-old Howard Street tunnel beneath the city and double-stack containers trucked from the Port of Baltimore onto freight trains.

With guns bristling, police officers in full tactical gear sweep across the vast deck of a cargo ship and creep up the stairs to the bridge. Their mission: Take the vessel back from armed intruders. Twice a month, the Natural Resources Police Tactical Response Team practices its craft. Tuesday morning's exercise was aboard the USNS Gilliland, a 956-foot vessel operated by the Navy Military Sealift Command and tied up at the Clinton Street Marine Terminal. "Basically it's a high-rise lying on its side, but it's a lot more complicated," said Sgt. Mel Adam, the squad leader, of the vessel.

Cargo volume at the port of Baltimore grew 15 percent last year, the largest increase of any major U.S. port, state officials announced Monday. The port's public and private terminals moved 37.8 million tons of goods from cars to coal in 2011. It all was valued at more than $51.4 billion, a 24 percent increase over 2010. "The port is leading the pack," said James White, executive director of the Maryland Port Administration. Longshoremen at the six public terminals managed by the administration set volume records in processing autos, wood pulp and containers.

With the wind whipping granules through the sweet-smelling air, Monday could have been just another day on the Domino Sugars docks in South Baltimore. But workers in orange coveralls unloading raw sugar from a massive cargo ship were making company history. In its nearly 90 years, the Domino refinery never before has received such a large single shipment of raw sugar - more than 95 million pounds. Moreover, Monday's arrival of the vessel Simon Schulte marked the largest single shipment of raw sugar ever to any port east of the Mississippi River, Domino officials said.

As a local business owner, I was happy for the opportunity to participate in the recent public meeting to discuss the proposed Baltimore Washington Rail Facility. While I agree that it is incredibly important to continue this discussion openly, I hope residents of our community will not lose sight of how important this facility can be to our local economy. In addition to driving economic growth, providing additional tax income to our local governments, and creating jobs, as a business owner, I see an even more important benefit.

Our state stands at the brink of a remarkable economic opportunity - and so do the tens of thousands of people whose jobs are related to the Port of Baltimore. In less than three years, an expanded Panama Canal is scheduled to open, permitting significantly larger cargo ships to pass through and come up the East Coast. And, thanks to the foresight of Gov. Martin O'Malley and his team at the Maryland Department of Transportation, our state will be ready as soon as next August, when dredging is completed on a deeper, 50-foot channel into the port.

WASHINGTON -- While airline passengers endure extensive and sometimes invasive security screening, the cargo in the hold is barely checked, a new federal report says. The report, issued yesterday by the Government Accountability Office, identifies significant vulnerabilities in the Department of Homeland Security's policies for guaranteeing the safety of the 23 billion pounds of commercial cargo shipped by air every year. The report was prepared at the request of five House members representing each party.

The port of Baltimore moved up one spot in the national rankings in cargo handling last year on the strength of a 37 percent jump from 2009 in the value of shipments over its docks, according to the U.S. Census. Gov. Martin O'Malley said Tuesday that the port had climbed to 11th place from 12th in the value of the cargo it handles and advanced two places, to 13th from 15th, in tonnage. The port grabbed the No. 1 spot among the nation's 360 ports in handling of three cargo categories: trucks, imported salt and imported iron ore. Previously, the port had held the No. 2 rankings in trucks and ore, and sixth place in salt.

On the evening of Feb. 2, 1942, an unarmed tanker with 66,000 barrels of crude oil on board was steaming in the Atlantic, about 90 miles off Ocean City . Without warning, it was struck by German torpedoes. The attack set the W.L. Steed ablaze, and sank it; only a handful of the crew of 38 survived. As World War II unfolded, the Germans had moved part of their sub pack west to attack shipping along the coast. By the time the Nazis withdrew the subs in July to focus on convoys crossing the North Atlantic, they had sunk 397 ships in U.S. coastal waters.