See this space oddity back on Earth
BARBARA HODGSON TRIES AN OUT-OF-THISWORLD EXPERIENCE
Families are descending on Locomotion at Shildon for a unique chance to see the spaceship which brought Tim Peake back to Earth from the International Space Station.
The bruised and battered Soyuz TMA19M space module, in which Peake made his descent, is on temporary show – for free – at the County Durham museum during its mini-tour of the UK.
And it brings with it a virtual reality experience so that visitors can have a taste of just what the descent would have felt like for those inside as they hurtled back home.
The module – a piece of history which now has a permanent home in the Science Museum in London – has already attracted 9,000 visitors to Locomotion in the week and a half it has been on show.
“And so far we have had more than 200 school bookings; and we expect that to sky rocket!” said Rebecca Fuller, who is promoting the Soyuz tour which takes in Science Museum Group venues such as Locomotion, and York National Railway Museum, thanks to a partnership with Samsung which is behind the stateof-the-art VR technology.
Durham County Council is involved too in the North East side of the story which sees the small space capsule on show adjacent to the museum’s huge trains – a symbol of industry might.
The North East gave Russia its first trains and it seems fitting that the Russian-made spacecraft is on show here as an example of how far engineering and transport have evolved.
The surprise is first sight of how tiny is the space capsule and it’s hard to imagine how its three astronaut occupants managed to fit inside, especially as we are seeing it with some equipment taken out to offer us a slightly better view – but visitors can’t get too close.
Attached is the parachute – enormous by comparison and actually the size of two tennis courts – which was deployed in the final stages of the descent, in order to slow it down enough for a survival impact when it hit the ground in Kazakhstan on June 18, 2016.
A video, on show alongside information boards, captures the moment the men were recovered from it, weak from their time in a weightless atmosphere, and Peake – whose mission saw him become the first British European Space Agency astronaut – appears to be the only one smiling. After his sixmonth mission in space, what he noticed first, he said, was Earth’s smell.
It is he who narrates the virtual reality experience on offer in an adjacent room and visitors who pay the £5 entry price are in for a treat.
Regular showings throughout the day cater for small groups of people, who have to be aged 13-plus, and don headsets which envelope them in a whole new reality.
It places the viewer, in the pilot’s seat and astronaut’s arms reach out before us, pressing buttons and flicking switches as Tim Peake appears on a screen in our craft explaining the process as we prepare for the descent from the ISS.
What follows is informative, fascinating and also thoroughly entertaining as we get to look 360 degrees around the interior of the space capsule and out of its porthole windows necessarily small, we’re told, as they’re its most vulnerable part – at the black expanse of universe.
Projecting around us is the white structure of the ISS – which always looks rather toy-like in images – and as our journey advances we soon see a view of the Earth and its terrifyingly thin-looking layer of atmosphere which is all that keeps humanity alive.
During our ‘descent,’ Peake talks us through the various stages of his 400km – four hour – journey, travelling at speeds of more than 27,000km an hour through the Earth’s atmosphere as the module’s outer surfaces heat up to more than 1,500 degrees.
We look out the windows to see the exterior is on fire; the module’s protective insulated covering burning – as designed – on its re-entry which accounts for its now-charred and blackened appearance.
It must have felt horribly hot and uncomfortable for Peake and his
fellow astronauts.
Then the screen and our virtual surroundings shake before the speed slows and finally the parachute slows it still further, from 287km to 22km an hour. There’s quite a jolt when it finally lands – in reality, says Peake, it feels like being hit by a truck.
Apparently, special motion chairs, adding movement to the experience, are to join the Soyuz tour at some stage over its two-year run but this is a brilliant experience even without them. And Locomotion’s flexible seating setup also means there is wheelchair access.
The exhibits are on show at Locomotion until January 15, offering a not-tobe-missed opportunity to see firsthand the first flown, manned spacecraft in the UK’s national space technology collection. There’s also an astronaut’s suit set-up for photo opportunities and knowledgeable staff at hand.
The tour has only taken in Bradford so far and next it will be York from January 17 to March 8; followed by Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast.