Space Traffic Managment - Memories for Life

Available for over a year

SPACE TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT 50 years ago, Sputnik 1 the first man made object to orbit the Earth was launched by the Soviet Union. In the five decades since, 100s of satellites have followed in its path. Today, 863 satellites orbit Earth. They are operated by 41 countries but no individual agency knows exactly where they all are at any one time – so the chances of big and expensive collisions are on the increase. Quentin talks to Ben Baseley Walker and Theresa Hitchens about bold new proposals for Space Traffic Management, why space debris is on the rise and whether catastrophic orbital pile-ups are imminent. MEMORIES FOR LIFE Also in the programme why your whole lifetime of experience could be put into gigabytes of storage space. Quentin meets Nigel Shadbolt, chairman of the Memories for Life grand challenge and Yorick Wilks from the Oxford Internet Institute to find out about a project to merge digital and physical worlds and how in the near future we could be storing all our memories for ever. Who will keep them, could they be kept private and how would it change our own concept of who we are? Quentin Cooper will also be celebrating National Poetry day with poems from Ashley Harrold.