OceanGate disaster puts spotlight on high-risk tourism, including space

The catastrophic implosion of a submersible visiting wreckage of the Titanic that left all five people on board dead is raising questions about regulation in the high-risk tourism industry — including space.

We’ll speak Michelle Hanlon, Co-Director of the Air and Space Law Program at the University of Mississippi School of Law, about the parallels between deep-sea adventures and space tourism trips and the path to regulation and safety.

Then, a European spacecraft is sending us new images of Mercury.

Only two missions have visited the planet closest to the sun. We’ll speak with Paul Byrne, Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Washington in St. Louis, about the challenges of visiting Mercury and what this next mission may tell us about that rocky and hellishly-hot planet.