Brexit impacts Gibraltar and UK Cities. Traffic Chaos. Deep Blue of Ocean and Space.

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Woke up to the news that Spain claims that Gibraltar would face a hard Brexit, even if the UK goes into a transition phase. The reason, apparently there has been no dialogue between the UK and Spain regarding Gibraltar. Gibraltarians voted with a vast majority against Brexit in the referendum.

This was followed by the exclusion of the UK cities entering for the bid of European Capital of the Year for 2023. Dundee, Nottingham, Leeds, Milton Keynes and Belfast/Derry had all submitted their bids last year before the referendum. The UK government said the competition would "run as normal", but warned  that it "may be subject to" the Brexit negotiations. The EU commission stated the UK would no longer be eligible to host a European Captial of the Year after leaving the EU in 2019.

There was a more personal impact of the continuing Brexit confusion when I attended the CETC event at the British Antarctic survey this evening. At least three EU citizens who had lived, worked, paid UK taxes and had children with British partners here over decades found themselves not knowing where their future lay and bitterly disappointed.

Getting to the event off Madingley road was a bit of a challenge. We set off just before rush hour and took nearly an hour to traverse the city to cover the 5.2 miles to the venue. This was just before the two accidents which closed the A14 in both directions. At least we found a parking space.

It was a fascinating evening, with speakers talking about exploring the sea bed around an underneath the Antarctic ice sheets, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane MH370 and mapping the seabed off the coast of Australia in the process, and a company looking to build a commercial astronaut training centre in the UK with a state of the art deep pool for weightless training. Impressed by the four enthusiastic engineering students who were continuing the tradition of developing ever more successful Cambridge Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, bringing along their Black Ghost, a previous model.

The two nuggets that stuck in my mind were  first, that for every hour of a planned spacewalk, an astronaut has to train seven hours in a pool mimicking weightlessness. The second was that when Alexey Leonov made the first ever spacewalk on March 18, 1965 , his space suit inflated too much in the vacuum of space. he could not reach the suit camera on his chest and, more importantly, he was now too big to get back into the spacecraft. Not wanting to be the first person to walk in space and then die, he opened a valve to let out air and depressurise his suit. He managed to squeeze back in but was on the verge of getting 'the bends'.