A couple of months ago, Cape Town was awash with astronomers, aeronautical engineers, astrophysicists, chemists, philosophers and other interesting people, all of them eager to share their knowledge – and in some cases, way-out theories – on everything from space elevators to the existence of extraterrestrial life. The magnet was the 62nd International Astronautical Conference, and it was a big deal.

What we found particularly satisfying was the willingness of the participants to engage with the public, which they did with great enthusiasm and good humour. Among them were Nasa chief and former astronaut Charles Bolden, and Dr Catherine Coleman, a cheerful and musically accomplished American astronaut who visited a local high school to talk about living and working in space. For the record, she once took four flutes into orbit aboard the International Space Station (ISS), and is probably the only space traveller who knows how it feels to play in zero gravity. In May this year, she left the ISS after logging an unbroken 159 days in space.

Then there was space-inspired poetry, a variety of astronomy and related events, space music, space art, and even a special-edition “space burger”, which we found at a little coffee shop near the convention venue (it was delicious, although the accompanying “asteroids”, aka gherkins, looked a little dodgy).

While all this was happening, conference delegates were discussing the myriad human challenges – both physical and psychological – that accompany space travel and survival in the unimaginably harsh environments of Mars and the Moon, as well as arcane issues of space law, space debris (there’s a lot of it out there, and plenty still to come), revolutionary propulsion systems, and much more.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet said: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Frankly, he didn’t know the half of it.

- Alan Duggan (aland@ramsaymedia.co.za)