19 miles above new mexico, and the type of sunrise that not many people have ever seen. Its the view from a test flight which is preparing to take tourists into the stratosphere by balloon. While all the attention has been focused on Space Tourism using rockets and space planes, weve got exclusive access to one company in the Arizona Desert thats been quietly building its own spaceport. Welcome to world view. Its really the way to do Space Tourism, because you want to go and spend time and look at the view and have a Gentle Ride Up and a gentle ride back. I mean, look, the rocket rides are going to be great, im sure, but for me, i want to sit there with my glass of champagne and my best friend and look. Tickets are currently selling for 75,000 each for a two hour ascent in a pressurised capsule to an altitude of 100,000 feet. Today, one of world views co founders and his team are showing me a small piece of the balloons material, a secret blend of polyethylene and other materials. I cant help but notice you have, i think, the worlds biggest table. Tell me you use this for christmas dinners. Absolutely, you should see the parties we have on this table so how long is the table . Its about a tenth of a mile. And, seriously, are you going to make a balloon that covers this entire table . So full scale balloons for heavy lift flights, so like a voyager flight, use the entire table. If you want to take a payload that is 10,000 pounds to 105,000 feet, it takes a balloon the size of this entire table, so you could take a Football Field and spin it inside the balloon when its fully inflated. Whoa contrary to what i thought, as the helium expands, it doesnt cause the material to stretch. Instead, the gas just occupies more of the initially empty balloon. Can you navigate when you are up there . Can you actually decide on a course . Or are you subject to whichever way the wind blows . So it turns out that in the stratosphere you very often get counter flowing winds, the stratosphere and the troposphere going different directions, and in that interface the wind swirls. So by guiding my altitude up and down, i can sort of sail the stratosphere, much like a ship uses the currents and winds to sail the oceans. I think that is really the innovation that were pushing, is figuring out how to do that navigation, when you can find the right winds and how you take advantage of different kinds of swirling in the winds. That is a large part of the innovation, along with just the ability to control your altitude and use solar energy to go up and go back down. And then theres the question of how you get back down again, which is apparently like this. They go into whats pretty close to freefall for Something Like ten seconds, so it feels very light, like going over the top of a roller coaster, just feeling light, and then we come back to about 16, 12 or 15 seconds later, so were just gaining some speed, and then it feels like a normal flight in an aircraft. But you have to be finished your champagne by then. One of our requirements was that you dont spill your champagne, literally, when that happens, and so i think we are going to have a little cup on the champagne. First world problem could you now put a little lid over the top of your champagne as we drop you back from space . The person who will make sure you dont spill your booze, or any other fluid for that matter, is the pilot. Its a unique job, and thats why an ex nasa test pilot and astronaut will be the one pulling the strings, as it were. What are your controls . When you are on a parafoil or Something Like that, you have this left right thing going on, is that what youve got, two strings . You can think of it that way, but in reality the spacecraft is about 10,000 pounds. Weve got a parachute thats the size of a basketball court, so we couldnt physically, you know, have enough force to pull on it. So we are actually controlling and probably with a joystick, were still designing exactly what its going to look like, but that joystick or that whatever controller is controlling motors that are pulling on lines on the parachute, just like you would if you were skydiving, butjust on a much, much bigger scale. What will this look like when its kitted out for passengers . When its kitted out for passengers, it will have these tremendous windows, at least four of them, four big ones and then some smaller ones. There will be seats for everybody, there will be a bar, who wants a spacecraft without a bar . And it will have a bathroom, its a five hour flight, at least, so you need a bathroom on board too. And you say this is the first spacecraft youve flown with a bar, so youve flown other spacecraft, then . I have. Tell me about this. So ive flown on both the us Space Shuttle and i flew on the russian soyuz spacecraft. How do you think this will compare to that . Itll be a different experience, i can tell you that, you know, when we came back with the soyuz, for instance, we hurtle through the atmosphere on fire at five miles per second. Its a very violent, very dynamic, lots of g forces, youre getting thrown all over the place in the cockpit, you feel the heat, youre labouring to breathe. This will be nothing like that. This will be a lot more gentle, a lot more relaxing, and frankly it will enable people to take in the experience a lot more. Its not like youre wondering whether youre going to survive the next second or not. We are going to have more from world view in a few minutes, but first lets come back Down To Earth and talk about the cities of our future, cities which are already capable of guiding our decisions, thanks to an explosion in cameras, sensors and artificially intelligent technology. Jen copestake has been to one of the most hi tech places on earth to see what might be in our connected future. Theres been a Great Variety of connected devices that have entered our lives in the last few years. Weve seen many concepts at trade shows around the world, with irons, fridges and robots communicating through the internet of things. Finding the best ways to put these devices to good use for Wider Society is a challenge that Large Companies and governments are now taking on. Singapore is the perfect test bed for internet of things technologies. Its a quintessential smart city, and that is because its only a0 kilometres across, so its very small, and the government here is heavily invested in technology initiatives, including investing in sensors all around the city. Along with sensors to monitor pollution and traffic, some buildings in singapore are equipped with accelerometers to monitor elderly peoples movements. Yuhua is a smart region of the city where all the homes are kitted out with smart technology. The government has now created an impressive 3d map model of yuhua where every tiny detail can be seen. What they did was they actually flew planes over the entire singapore and scanned the entire country, and then what we did was take the model and load it in here, and we enhanced the model to this level of quality. Thats cool. So these are separately modelled from the buildings, the buildings are separately modelled as each building, object, for example. If you click on a building, it tells you consumption versus generation, for example, all right . And you could click on solar panel, and you just get. For those particular panels. Exactly. This is, again, very typical of singapore, high rise living. And that is the waste management. It incredible, we are seeing these green pathways shooting out across the building, where are they going . They are not meteors or anything like that, they are just simulating how garbage is disposed in high rise living, down the chute, you open the hopper, you drop the garbage, and it gets collected in a huge bin down at the bottom. Its certainly mesmerising, which is something i never thought id say about garbage collection. Its quite a science here and for driving around the city, how about a ride in an autonomous taxi . Singapore became the worlds first city to introduce the cars created by mit Start Up Nutonomy that travel around six kilometres of the citys tech district. Companies are also testing the way that Artificial Intelligence can integrate into projects. Ibm has opened a new lab here, focusing on al. This includes a pilot we saw late last year, where its Watson System is helping nurses in a Busy Icu Ward by monitoring vital signs and triaging the most at risk patients. You could even think of this as a command and control centre for multiple hospitals, right . Because parkway has a network of hospitals, and if they really wanted to, they could create a kind of command and control centre, where someone is monitoring all their icus around the region. If you see that some of your patients are trending negatively, you obviously want to focus more on them, and the ones that are doing fine, you canjust continue monitoring as per normal. But you know where to put your energy and put your resources. The Singapore Government is pushing Digital Transformation with its new agency, govtech. We had a brief demo of its online services, including myinfo, a portal designed to make things like banking transactions easier by keeping verification details all in one place. Its protected by strict Data Protection laws and is an opt in service. The overarching idea is to make technologies such a central part of life here, to make it possible to keep pace with regulation. Weve seen this to be more challenging elsewhere, particularly with laws on autonomous vehicles. Singapore will continue to act as a Tech Testing Ground for finding ways to integrate new technologies with society and be a case study for other countries to watch. Hello and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week that Mark Zuckerberg appeared in court to deny accusations that the software behind facebook owned 0culuss success was stolen. Meanwhile, instagram has followed in owner facebooks footsteps, adding a live video streaming function for uk users, although each one will Self Destruct as soon as it finishes. A Disappearing Photo Option has appeared too. Mobile network ee has been fined £2. 7 million for overcharging Tens Of Thousands of customers. And squirrels have been blamed for being a bigger threat to the power grid than the risks posed by international cybercriminals. Samsung, listen up researchers at Stanford University have developed a Lithium Ion Battery that claims to release a Fire Extinguishing material if overheating occurs. If youre wondering where the robots are in this weeks news, well, they seem to have gone walkabout. This telepresence mind controlled bot has been developed to help those with severe motor disabilities. Claiming to be the first of its kind available to consumers, it connects through an off the shelf brain control device, resulting in users feeling as though they are in two places at once. And finally, if you ever travelled to japan, youll know about the toilets, which are beautifully hi tech, but you may not be quite sure what to make of them. Well, some leading manufacturers have agreed on a standardised set of icons for Common Cleaning features to help tourists know what theyre letting themselves in for. Im in the Arizona Desert near tucson at the new headquarters of world view, which is planning to take people to the stratosphere in a helium balloon. This is spaceport tucson. This is a 700 foot wide circle just outside of world views buildings, and in just a couple of weeks time, this is where they will launch a Space Balloon from for the first time. Its a circle so that they can lay the balloon out in any direction they need to, depending on the winds on that day. Ive just got to say, if youve never been to the desert, i dont think you really have an appreciation of how big the sky is. That is what its all about. World views boss, jane poynter, is a developer of technologies for extreme environments like space. And she hopes that the view from 20 miles up will give passengers a unique perspective on the fragility of our planet. And curiously, this project was born out of a view that was pretty much the opposite when its two founders took part in a two year study of how age humans, plus animals and plants, would interact and survive in a completely closed ecosystem. 8 humans. You come from a space background, but really interesting, in the early 90s, you shut yourself away in biosphere 2 with some other crazy. I mean, some other people what was that like . Oh, my gosh, so biosphere 2 was actually an inspiration for world view, so when we were in the biosphere, one of the most extraordinary experiences that i had, and i think most of the people in there had, was the experience of really being part of our biosphere, and you really get this sense of the unity of the biosphere that we are in, that is on such a huge scale, but in normal life we cant even imagine it, really. And its a very similar idea to the experience that astronauts having the earth from space, and it was that experience that we wanted to give people, because of the experience that weve had in the biosphere. So i guess its easy to imagine that we are all looking at you guys in the biosphere, but i suppose youre looking out from a unique Vantage Point as well. Thats right, so both truths are true, so we had people walk around the outside of the biosphere, and i got e mails from people who said, i get it now ive been hearing about the fact that this planet is a finite place for some many years, and i never understood until i walked around this miniature version of our planet. And suddenly i got it, i could see its boundaries, i knew that you guys that were living inside only had what you had in there, which is exactly the same as we have right here on planet earth, on spaceship earth. Emotions certainly run high in that kind of environment, but theyre not all bad. One of the other biosphere 2 crewmembers was taber maccallum, who later becamejanes husband. Hes explaining how, although a balloon cant technically get you into the vacuum of space, the conditions in the stratosphere are similar enough, with very low air pressure and extremes of temperature in the sun and shade, to mean that world views balloons are already carrying scientific equipment up in so called stratolites, which can hang over one location for days at a time. So theres satellites in low earth orbit that are whizzing around at 17,000 mph, there are satellites in Geostationary Orbit that are very far away, have a hard time focusing in on things. And then below that we have aircraft, that can carry cameras and drones, and where we sit is sort of between all those. We can sit over a piece, persist over a piece of land for a while, and we have a close view, because we are only about 20 miles up, but we dont have the speed and expense of being a rocket, and we dont have all of the fuel burn of flying an airplane through the air. It is a compelling argument, i suppose that rockets are dangerous, and they are expensive, and they are rather noisy. And if you want to send something up close to space, and you can do it with a balloon, why wouldnt you . Its also a compelling argument that the more people who see the earth from way up there,the more people may have the kind of transcendental shifting viewpoint that seems to be striving the team here. It changes the way you embed yourself in our biosphere, the way you think about our place in this biosphere that we inhabit. I mean, it clearly changes the way many people have gone about developing our environmental movement. It changes the way we think about communication around the planet, collaborating with people around the planet. It really does strip away the notion of boundaries, of national boundaries, because we think of this as an entity that we all inhabit at once. What has changed is my definition of the word home, and when we had the re entry of the soyuz spacecraft, we initially hit the ground, flipped and rolled over, and now my window was pointing down at the ground, and i remember looking at the window and seeing a rock, a flower and a blade of grass, and i rememberthinking, im home. What was really interesting about that thought is i was home, but i was in kazakhstan, and so to me my home wasntjust in houston, texas, where at the time i lived with my family my home expanded to include earth, and i think our definition of that word home has profound implications for how we problems on our planet, how we treat each other, how we treat our planet, and i think that is one of the things that were trying to do here. How we problem solve. Were trying to bring that perspective to as many people as we can, because i think the more people who have that perspective, the more people who have the opportunity to see our planet from that Vantage Point, the better of all of us here on the surface are going to be. There are few countries which can match the speed at which the us is boldly striding into the future, but china is certainly one of them. With an economy that is doubling in size every decade, china is in a hurry. But unlike america, often that progress is built literally on top of some amazing history railroading through plans for new builds without pausing to preserve the past. Dan simmons has been to shanghai to meet the citys professor of preservation. I found this problem, they destroyed these older buildings, so i warned them, you cant do it. But i think they dont understand the value of these buildings, so after that i just gave the information to the newspaper. The professor is unusual for china in that hes not afraid to speak out against plans to destroy some of the countrys finest architectural heritage. Oh, wow what a mess do you know why theyve pulled down heritage buildings like this . I think the reason is they think these buildings are not safe and not comfortable for people who live here, so the government may be want to do some good thing, but in the wrong way. What used to be here look