Days 14-16 – At Sea

Hi folks, we haven’t posted for a couple of days as we’ve been at sea, Bridge is still tired after her illness, and we’ve not done a great deal. All we seem to have done is eat, sleep and watch movies!

However, we have attended two lectures by former NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan, an incredibly impressive woman, who talked about the immediate future of the conquest of space and the possible ramifications of that. Did you know that there are no property rights in space? Or usage rights? Or conflict resolution? Squabbles, litigation and possibly worse are almost inevitable in the very near future. It is getting pretty crowded up there too – did you know that there are currently 7500 active satellites and the US government has applications for 64,000 more. There are 26,000 items of man-made debris floating about, comprising 2,800 defunct satellites and 2,040 discarded rocket components. There are 130 million fragments of debris measuring between 1mm to 1cm and travelling at 20,000 mph. If one of those collides with another object it will cause an impact equivalent to a gunshot. This creates obvious hazards for future space vessels and astronauts bobbing about doing their space walks.

Global government investment in space is currently only 25% of the total spend annually; the rest is now private enterprise, namely Elon Musk’s SpaceX, but also Amazon and numerous others. Most of the money is being spent by satellite service providers.

Fancy a holiday in space? Space tourism in 2021 was valued at $695 million. For the price of a modest house, you can reserve a seat on a sub-orbital space craft that will take you to the edge of space for about 5 minutes, at great personal risk to everyone on board. Hmmm… I think we’ll stick to cruising thanks! 😆