The Five Dangers of Spaceflight

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==THE FIVE DANGERS OF SPACEFLIGHT==
===ARTEMIS BYRNE===
====INTRODUCTION====
Piracy, Navigational Hazards, Slipspace, Isolation, and Malfunction.
Of the myriad dangers that plague the act of spaceflight, there are five that shall invariably be encountered by all crews at least once on any journey. Space is vast, unending, and inherently empty. With light years between Stars, AU between planets, and millions upon millions of kilometres between vessels, every danger is amplified.
The routes that freighters take between outposts is known to all by common parlance. In the event that something goes wrong, ships remain on their routes as best they can, so eventual Search & Rescue will find them, or their derelict, drifting between planets or stars. 
The navigational hazards and ‘harsh waters’, for lack of a better term, are common civilian knowledge. To plan around this knowledge, to take advantage of it, to act in nefarious or ostensibly ‘benevolent’ self interest, has been the mainstay of navies and cutthroats alike since Man first took to the waters.
To that end, the first and foremost danger that any Crew will come to face on their voyages, is one of the oldest and most common enemy of shipping and leisure alike.
====DANGER ONE - HOSTILES====
So cornered and corralled is mankind by the seven dimensional subsace that surrounds and permeates us, it often feels that we are little more than mice herded down ever-shifting corridors. As indispensable as the Slipstream is for space travel, it holds some of the greatest mystery and unknowable dangers within it. 
Yet the passages between stars are, to our collective knowledge, static and unyielding. Some hold firm, and fast, as straits in an ocean. Some are nebulous and unkind, frought with danger and peril. 
Navigational hazards permeate both the realspace and the subspace dimensions, from asteroids to eddies, solar flares to slip termination. To account for these is as impossible as counting grains of sand.
Yet there is always one, so prevalent and so commonplace that a freighter is statistically guaranteed to pass by at least one pirate, insurrectionist, or ostensibly hostile vessel while pulling into port, and while leaving.
Piracy is as omnipresent as Humanity itself is, and the myriad secessionist movements plaguing the UNSC are enough that there’s often Insurrectionists, adjacent smugglers, underhanded freelancers, or mercenaries milling about in orbit above even the most isolated and small colony world. In fact, the farther out into the frontier a planet is, the more chance there is of that world being a ‘Libertalia’, meaning a freighter captain, starship pilot, or hauling crew should make doubly sure before even taking a contract where they’re going, and who the destination truly belongs to.
More freighters go missing just after launch, and just before arrival, than all other dangers combined.
And, while there has never been a formal declaration of war, as there are is no centralised government to levy it at, the threat of warfare claiming the lives of innocent ship crews is as omnipresent as starlight.
Unfortunate happenstance damages more ships than all other dangers, yet in minor ways. So minor, in fact, that they can often be ignored until compounding damage renders a ship a malfunctioning wreck.
The second danger will always and forever be these hazards. Navigational annoyances, major eddies, tumultuous and raging slipspace currents. 
====DANGER TWO - NAVIGATIONAL HAZARDS====
Asteroids, solar flares, radiation, electronic interference, and even debris can quickly waylay or severely damage a ship, its systems, or even its crew.
Though mostly this Danger is primarily associated with Realspace, asteroids, solar flares, and other such spatial phenomena can also be found within Slipspace. Asteroids caught in localised slipfields, flare radiation that travelled through a rupture, they do exist, though they are uncommon.
These are not the only danger that slipspace holds. Slip termination, temporal disturbances—the esoteric and unknowable dimension is as fraught with danger as anywhere else. Moreso, some would claim, and not without reason.
There are numerous documented instances of vessels both civilian and military exiting Slipspace days or even weeks after they were due, with the time onboard suggesting that mere hours or days had passed since they embarked, respectively.
Or, the opposite, where ships that have arrived after days of travel have claimed to have been in transit for months. This inherently troublesome and little-understood property of Slipspace gives rise to the next danger—the danger of Slipspace itself.
====DANGER THREE - SLIPSPACE====
While typically this extra time is spent in cryosleep for the average crewman, the extra shifts required for the maintenance of the vessel have taken their toll. AI stationed onboard vessels also suffer for this extra time, spending months of their comparatively fleeting lifespans in total silence and isolation—two of the deadliest maladies to afflict an Artificial Intelligence in large quantities.
The weeks or months of extra unplanned spaceflight often take their toll on organic crews as well. Crews unused to working such lengths of time in enclosed spaces. Even among the most seasoned of crew, used to long-haul flights from the Inners to the Outers, have been subjected to flights double their usual length.
Psychological screening for starship crews cannot always account for Slipspace phenomenon that may impede, delay, or outright strand a ship within subspace for extended periods of time.
Thus the fourth danger to accost crews on short or long voyages is invariably the isolation, and thus the crew itself.
====DANGER FOUR - ISOLATION====
The effects of isolation on the Psyches and even physical health of subjects has been the subject of more than a thousand scientific studies. They have all proven the same thing; prolonged isolation is detrimental, leads to secondary and tertiary mental and physical conditions, and causes shrinkage within various areas of the brain. Most notably, hypothalamus and amygdala.
Space is a vast and inherently unknowable, terrifying medium of travel. Slipspace is a non-Euclidean realm of broken physics, inconsistent temporal lineage, and nonsensical topography. Exposure to Slipspace travel can cause hallucinations, machine failures, stress, and even periods of psychosis. 
This is before factoring in dangerous physical phenomena such as Slipspace’s Fractalline Events, Slip Termination, and the storms, eddies, and temporal pockets found within Slipspace itself.
There is a reason civilian travel was limited for so much of Humanity’s spacefaring history.
There is nothing in space but what the crew brings with them. Isolation is the largest killer of starship crew.
====DANGER FIVE - MALFUNCTION====
From the days of the first satellite launch, to the time of the first Slipspace transition, all the way up to the latest launch of a freighter from an orbital Counterweight, there has ever been malfunctions.
Early on, humanity learned that redundant systems were mandatory, and even they needed to have backups, bypasses, broad-stroke maintenance routines, and even then, it was never enough.
Malfunctions are constant, never-ending sources of headache and stress for crews. They consume the majority of dock time fixing, they require onboard specialist knowledge to tackle, and if left untendedf for long enough, they can kill.
Every journey, no matter how small, will experience at least one malfunction. It is the duty of the crew, and is imperative to the survival of passengers, to tackle them near as soon as they show up. If they cannot be fixed, they need to be mitigated.
And if they can’t be, then in the worst case scenario, the entire system could fail, and the ship could be in danger of destruction, death, or major injury.
Most commonly, life support systems, sewage treatment, waste recycling, and power surges are among the most numerous malfunctions. Courses on spaceflight basics focus on what the layperson can do to mitigate these issues prior to the arrival of maintenance specialists.
Most commonly, the number one piece of advice given is to avoid panicking, cut power to the affected regions of machinery or wiring, or initiate emergency reboots.
Most of the time, malfunctions are minor enough that these solutions ar enough.
For everything else, there are multitools.
====CONCLUSION====
Space remains dangerous. As dangerous as Mankind’s first forays into interplanetary travel. From the missing minutes of the Apollo missions, to the failure of the first Martian habitat.
Without this danger, Mankind would not be nearly as adaptable to the medium of space travel as we are now. 
Freighter captains, starship pilots, servicepersons onboard UNSC and CMA warships, and even Insurrectionists, have near-unanimously agreed, silently and without intervention, to refer to space travel as ‘Running the Five’.
Every danger listed above will be encountered at least once on a journey, either tangentially, or directly. Knowing them, knowing how to respond to them, and how to survive them, is paramount.