Local leaders have ambitious plans to develop new port facilities and hotels, and to modernise the dry dock.
With the ship considered beyond economic repair, its final destination is expected to be a dry dock in Sicily, where it will be cut up.
Despite the arch-capitalist atmosphere, half the sheikhdom's top hotels, its airport, seaports, refinery, dry dock, aluminium smelter and two of its three banks, among other assets, are government-controlled.
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It said the next voyage would go ahead on Thursday but an Adriatic cruise in October has been cancelled while the ship is repaired in a German dry dock.
Even that would involve filling the hull up to the lower deck with electrolyte and, to balance the pressure, probably flooding the bottom part of the dry dock with Thames water.
The current HMS Campbeltown, which is about to be decommissioned, bears the name of a vessel deliberately blown up in an attempt to destroy a dry dock in occupied France in 1942.
Once the flare was released at 1213 BST, he led 62 seconds of cheers, to mark the 62 seconds it took for Titanic to slide from its dry dock and into the Irish sea.
Instead of sitting in the dry dock supported by numerous props and stays, it would be suspended in a Kevlar cradle on a cantilevered steel frame disguised to look like the surface of the sea.
They wanted to transfer it to Rosemont, where it would become a dry-dock casino floating in 2 feet of water, miles from the closest river.
By the mid-1920s, the Cutty Sark was the only one still afloat and in 1954 it was transferred to its current dry-dock site in Greenwich.
With 67 berths and extensive dry-dock facilities, it is the largest man-made port in the world and the largest port in the Gulf region and in the Middle East.
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