“Before I became an astronaut, I had seen stories of astronauts who had seen white flashes from radiation while they flew in space,” says Terry Virts, a former Nasa astronaut. On the fifth night of his first flight – a 2010 mission with the Space Shuttle Endeavour – he had just got into bed. “I… closed my eyes and boom! This gigantic white, blinding flash happened in my eyes – and I didn’t hear anything.”

As more entrepreneurs dabble in space flight – like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who just launched his new Heavy rocket in Florida – they’ll find they have to contend with these kinds of bizarre phenomena.

One of the oddest of all is the one witnessed by Virts. This is the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), which combines a massive flash of light without any sound. But the SAA isn’t just a strange sight. It wreaks havoc on computers in the vicinity and exposes nearby humans to higher radiation levels – something that has earned it its nickname ‘the Bermuda Triangle of space’.

As manned space flights become more common and astronauts become more reliant on computers, the challenges SAA poses could become only more acute.