Spacewalking (kind of)
You can step out like an astronaut on a space walk in, erm, Somerset...
How to take interplanetary strides.
ONE SMALL STEP on July 20th 1969 has to be the most famous in history, as Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. 650 million people watched his left boot make contact, forging a print 13 inches by six in the talcum-dusty surface that is still there today. Three years later Charlie Duke became the 10th astronaut to tread the moon, landing in the lunar highlands with Apollo 16:
‘It was the most beautiful terrain I’d ever seen. There were shades of grey and there was such a sharp contrast between the lunar surface and the blackness of space. Earth was just there suspended upon nothing... It was just awesome.’
Now, we realise the odds of you taking a moonwalk (other than on a dancefloor) are vanishingly small. Still only a dozen people
– all men, all American – have set foot on our only natural satellite, but there is space adventure to be had much closer to home. On a towpath near Taunton, in fact.
The Somerset Space Walk is a 1:530,000,000 scale model that fits the planets of our solar system along the 14-miles of the Bridgwater and Taunton Canal. The sun is an eight-foot sphere at the halfway point at Higher Maunsel Lock, with a set of models of Mercury, Venus, Earth (with moon), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto stretching out in both directions, to show their full orbit. You can tick off the first four within 220 feet of this sun but it’s 6.8 miles to reach far-flung Pluto, and you’ll find it’s the size of a pea. Designed by Taunton inventor Pip Youngman, this walk – where every step represents 250,000 miles out there in the starry beyond – has to be one of the best ways on Earth to wrap your mind around the immensity of space.
WALK HERE: Find out more at bit.ly/SomersetSpace