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[SmileyMan]

Pretty much any spacecraft stands out like a blowtorch in the cold, cold depths of space.

Ahem.

I defer to this excellent webpage

[DJ]

There's a lot of damn big rocks in Kuiper belt, and multiple dwarf planets.

[Soadreqm]

I told you to hold onto your butts, but did you listen to me? Oh no. You just gone done started talking about how there is or isn't stealth in space. Y'all shoulda shut up and sat down, but now I reckon y'all gonna start a flamewar.

What better to keep us warm in the cold space that is also an ideal insulator?

[RedKing]

I don't really want to contribute any further to the hot mess this thread has turned into, but I do have to chuckle at all the "Space travel will HAVE to be government/corporate-funded because of the $$$ involved". I'm sure somebody circa 1880 said something along the lines of, "I daresay, the horseless carriage is destined to remain the transport of only the most affluent given the cost of procuring such a complicated device and the small army of technicans required for its daily maintenance, what!"

And a couple thousand years before that, only the rich and powerful had transportation that didn't involve...y'know, walking.

I have no doubts that space travel will eventually be mass-produced, cheap and accessible. That said, space piracy is liable to take the form of hijacking and/or whacking you on the head AFTER you step out of your spaceship. If you look at most hard sci-fi, it posits a future of ship-to-ship combat in space that is basically one short, brutal pass where each ship has had days to plan and fires a swarm of kinetic kill vehicles and countermeasures. Once both sides have launched all their munitions, you just wait and brace to get hit. Combat would be relegated to watching blips on a radar screen for the most part.