There were a few amusements to be had at the Seradata Space Conference in London in June.
Tim Fuller of Seradata raised a few ghoulish laughs when showing a launch event query during his excellent demonstration of SpaceTrak3 which had a “fatalities” field on the report. “It is ready for space tourism,” he nonchalantly quipped, though, in truth, he hopes we will never have to use it.
Other laughs to be had were in the conference gift bag. A toy rocket we supplied was noted as being “completely reusable” as a hint to the launch providers attending. At the same time your correspondent had to plead with the audience not to use them to make ballistic missile attacks onto any speakers they did not like.
On that score, and to avoid such a fate, your correspondent always precedes any talk he gives to underwriters on the space insurance market by noting that, in doing so, he is very much like a eunuch watching seductions going on in a harem. That is, he can comment on what is going on, and even note where he thinks those engaged in such activity are going wrong…but without being sure that he can actually do it himself! 🙂
Of course, on the subject of speakers, it is always an idea to confirm the pronunciation and spelling of the speakers’ names…that is, if they know them themselves. Alan Perera-Webb of CST sheepishly had to admit that for all his life he got the spelling his own double-barrelled surname wrong after belatedly realising this after being corrected by his mother (the Perera bit is supposed to have an ‘I’ in it somewhere).
During the insurance panel your correspondent as the adjudicator jokingly told the panellists that personal insults were allowed so long as they were relevant to the argument in hand.
In doing so he used the comparison that saying that Peter Elson of JLT was too tall would be an example of a disallowed insult as it was irrelevant, but that deriding his choice of tie might be allowable if it is described as being symptomatic of his poor judgement in all things.
At this point, your correspondent would just like to note for the record that he liked the tie that Peter Elson wore on the day. Good choice (and good judgement) Peter! And he does not think he is too tall either. 🙂
And thank you
While there were a few minor irritations including having restrooms that were a bit small (even the downstairs ones were full of rough men 🙂 ), and the main room not having a raised stage making it difficult for those at the back to see the bottom of the screen, overall the feedback you have given us has been overwhelmingly positive. We at Seradata were gratified that the one day conference received an average overall mark of 4.5 out of 5 (with 5 being the best) from those attendees who replied on the opinion questionnaire.
By the way, an especial thanks goes to whoever put down a mark of 6 out of five for your correspondent’s performance. 🙂 Thanks mum!
We would thank the World Space Risk Forum (WSRF) for their support with this successful inaugural and probably last Space Conference in Seradata’s colours. Seradata is very happy that WSRF is taking over the running of the London space risk conferences. We have experienced how much work it takes to put such conferences on and we know that their professional approach bodes very well for London events in the future. As such, we will endeavour to help and support them as much as we can.
Finally, Tim Fuller, Phil Hylands and I would like to thank David Wade, Sally Hylands and Heather Fuller for their help on the day, and to all the speakers and to all the attendees for coming. We enjoyed it, and we hope and think you did too.
For more about the insurance panel see here:
For more about the technology and market trends see here:
