I'm A Rider- Graham Turnock

- John Whitney

Cycling owes a lot to the space industry. The advent of satellite television helped indulge my interest for professional road cycling. I’ve been an armchair fan since I was a teenager, watching the Channel 4 coverage of the Tour de France, but when satellite TV came along [in the 1990s] it transformed how much of the sport myself and others were able to access.

Perhaps the biggest of all is GPS. Strava certainly wouldn’t exist. ‘Global Positioning System’ is actually the name of the American system and the one that our bike computers are predominantly using. ‘Sat navs’ - or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) - is the overarching term for any system that uses satellites for geo-spatial positioning and there are three systems that currently have worldwide coverage: GPS, the Russian’s GLONASS and the European Union’s Galileo.