21 Facts About Christopher Riley

Christopher Riley was born on 1967 and is a British writer, broadcaster and film maker specialising in the history of science.

Christopher Riley has a PhD from Imperial College, University of London where he pioneered the use of digital elevation models in the study of mountain range geomorphology and evolution.

Christopher Riley makes frequent appearances on British television and radio, broadcasting mainly on space flight, astronomy and planetary science and was visiting professor of science and media at the University of Lincoln between 2011 and 2021.

Christopher Riley studied geology at the University of Leicester for his first degree and completed his PhD at Imperial College, University of London in the mid-1990s.

Christopher Riley co-presented the BBC's live coverage of the 1999,2001 and 2015 solar eclipses.

Christopher Riley was the science consultant on the BBC's remakes of their science fiction cult classics A for Andromeda and The Quatermass Experiment.

Christopher Riley directed and produced on the feature documentary film In the Shadow of the Moon, which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Audience Documentary Award.

Christopher Riley directed on the spinoff six-part series Moon Machines for the Discovery Channel in 2008, which celebrated the 400,000 engineers who'd made the Moonshots possible.

Olsson and Christopher Riley went on to show that the words were spoken spontaneously and were not rehearsed or composed by some 'wordsmith' beforehand as many have speculated they might have been.

In 2011 Christopher Riley teamed up with the European Space Agency and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli to make the feature-length documentary First Orbit which re-created Yuri Gagarin's pioneering spaceflight Vostok 1.

Christopher Riley produced Kevin Fong's 2011 portrait of the Space Shuttle for BBC Two and Produced and Directed a 2012 film presented by Dallas Campbell which celebrated thirty-five years of NASA's Voyager Program for BBC Four.

The film includes interviews with his son Carl, his daughter Michelle and his sister, physicist Joan Feynman who Christopher Riley subsequently wrote a short biography about.

Christopher Riley directed across the series and wrote and directed the episode 'Survival' featuring astronaut Jerry Linenger.

The series is hosted by actor Will Smith In September 2023 it was announced that Christopher Riley was co-writing The Moonwalkers with actor Tom Hanks, for the Lightroom, an immersive venue in London.

In 2005 Christopher Riley was given a Sir Arthur Clarke Award for his work producing the BBC's Space Odyssey series.

Christopher Riley received a second Sir Arthur Clarke Award in 2008 for In the Shadow of the Moon.

Christopher Riley has directed, produced, science consulted or hosted on the following films and TV series :.

In 2009, to coincide with the 40th Anniversary of the flight of Apollo 11, Christopher Riley collaborated with the London Science Museum on a novel video installation called "Apollo Raw and Uncut" which projected all 23 hours of NASA's 16mm Apollo flight film, shot on Apollo missions AS-501 to AS-512.

In 2015, ahead of the 40th anniversary of the Voyager spacecraft's launch from Earth, Christopher Riley proposed sending a final message to the memory banks of each spacecraft as a final tribute to the Golden Records each spacecraft carries.

In 2019 Christopher Riley collaborated with 59 Productions, on their Smithsonian Air and Space Museum commission "Apollo 50:Go for the Moon" - writing the show and creating a film to complement projections onto the Washington Monument to tell the story of Apollo 11 for the 50th anniversary of the mission in July that year.

Christopher Riley has written, co-written and contributed to over a dozen books, including Where once we stood, a collaboration with artist and illustrator Martin Impey, nominated for a Kate Greenaway medal in 2020.