July 20 marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing and event organizers at the Saint Louis Science Center want the look into the past to encourage visitors to leap into the future of space exploration.
The landmark anniversary falls on a Saturday, which made it an obvious theme for the museum’s free SciFest series, according to Paul Freiling, the science center’s director of emerging technology.
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“SciFest events are a way we connect the public to scientists and current science in the community,” Freiling says. They mesh with the museum’s mission to “ignite and sustain lifelong science and technology learning,” he adds. “What we’re hoping to get out of this is to ignite visitors’ interest in space science and, through that, to connect them to groups locally that can help sustain their interest.”
The Apollo 50th Anniversary Moon Landing Party SciFest event will take place from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on July 20 and feature speakers, displays, and hands-on activities from NASA’s Solar System Ambassadors program, the St. Louis Astronomical Society, the St. Louis Rocketry Association, St. Louis Space Frontier, and Washington University’s Earth & Planetary Sciences Department, among others.
Activities include a model rocket launch and landing competition organized by the rocketry association in which participants can keep a model and the competition’s winner will take home a trophy that includes an actual space-flown piece of foil from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. While such swag will definitely draw interest from those who remember watching static-filled footage of the moon landing on their living room television sets, organizers hope the moon landing party attracts space enthusiasts of all ages.
“The kids walking in the building that day could be the astronauts that are landing on the moon, exploring, and taking us all the way to Mars,” Freiling says. “Space exploration doesn’t just have to be a look into the past. It can be a portal into the future.”
The Science Center is also featured in or featuring these anniversary-related events:
- NASA TV is airing a special about the moon landing on July 19, part of which was shot at the Science Center with local middle schoolers. The students spent time using blueprints to build lunar habitats using recycled materials, and two participants acted out a script depicting what it would be like to land on the moon.
- The OMNIMAX Theater will bring back Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon, presented and narrated by Tom Hanks. Audiences are transported to the surface of the moon to walk alongside the 12 extraordinary astronauts who have been there, experiencing what they saw, heard, felt, thought and did. The theater is one of the Science Center’s ticketed attractions.
- The museum is currently hosting a special traveling exhibition, A New Moon Rises, from Smithsonian on display in the tunnel leading to/from the Planetarium. Among other elements, A New Moon Rises features large-scale, high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface taken between 2009 and 2015 by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC).
