Space Centre
January 5th, 2007 at 20:53

Today Katy and I went to the National Space Centre in Leicester. Neither of us had been before, and I think its fair to say that it’s probably the closest either of us are going to get to actually going into space, so it was all good.

Here’s a picture of me and a rocket (Katy refused to be pictured, presumably because she thought you readers would be too busy looking at me to notice her anyway):

It was much like you’d expect- exhibits, old spacey things, and visual metaphors to illustrate the relative mass of the planets.

There was one exhibit there that claimed to be a “Martian meteorite”- I’d love it if any scientists reading could explain to me how a bit of rock can go from Mars, float up out of Mars’ atmosphere across space and then hit the Earth, as I can’t even make a ridiculous uninformed assumption to explain that.

On the journey there, I also thought of another irritating science question that seemed to scare Katy a bit: gravity is proportional to mass, right? So if we keep sending stuff into space and not getting it back, there’s less matter on Earth, and thus Earth’s gravity will decrease? Similarly, if technology gets to a point like in Red Dwarf where we’re mining on Jupiter and bringing resources back to Earth, surely it will reach a point where Earth’s gravity will increase, fucking a few things up? I realise these will only have a tiny difference, but surely even that will (eventually) make a difference?

And energy and matter can be “changed into each other”, for lack of a scientific sounding word… and energy doesn’t have mass, right? Thus, if we keep burning all of the oil and so on, surely the earth will lose a lot of mass and thus gravity?

I’m not sure what point I’m making. I’m probably talking rubbish.

But anyway, also there was an IMAX style cinema, where the pictures are projected on to a dome on the ceiling, meaning that you get essentially 180 degrees of video. Disappointingly, the film was a Toy Story-esque computer generated, but it was still interesting. Beforehand there was a safety announcement, with the advice being that if you feel nauseous, you should, er, close your eyes. The one scene that stood out for me was when a character had the dangers of space travel humorously demonstrated on him- freezing and weightlessness, and so on. At the end of the scene the character took revenge on the professor character subjecting him to these things by sending him up into space on a firework.

As the firework was being set-up on screen, the narrator told us how most space fatalities occur on take off and landing. The firework takes off and explodes in almost exactly the same way as the Challenger space shuttle. Tasteful.

Perhaps the scariest part of the day was when I had a go at presenting the weather. (You’ll see me explain all this on the video below too.) Inexplicably, like every museum or place of learning that I’ve been to, all have a chromakey setup going that lets you pretend you’re a weather presenter. I think the tenuous link here is that satellites are used to forecast the weather.

So I enter the booth, and press the “go” button, and the TV instructs me to read the autocue and point at things on the map. It starts up, so I try my best for a few seconds, reading accurately and pointing and everything, before suddenly becoming incredibly self concious. I believe I just stopped, looked out of the booth towards Katy and remarked “what the fuck am I doing? I look ridiculous”, before leaving. Unfortunately for me, the booth had been recording my performance, and played it back on a TV outside after the autocue had finished doing its thing. And it had a loud speaker. So all we heard was “What the fuck am I doing? I look ridiculous” echoing all over the Space Centre, with me on the TV screen… which was being watched by a few small children. Whoops. I think it must have played it back a few times as well – it certainly felt like a long time.

Here’s a video of my day:

I’d like to thank Katy for coming, and TomTom for getting us there. And the Cold War for developing the technology that made the Space Centre possible.

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