The Science Museum is opening a Tim Peake astronaut VR experience
You'll be able to hurtle back to Earth in his space shuttle
Cast your mind back.
You’re six years old, without a care in the world and you’re absolutely convinced that in a few years you’re definitely going to be an astronaut – there’s no doubt about it.
You know, because you’ve been practising relentlessly. You’ve sat in a cardboard box in the back garden with your mum’s mixing bowl on your head for the last 23 consecutive Saturdays. Your training must surely be almost complete.You’re surprised that you haven’t been headhunted by NASA already.
Fast forward 20 years or so. Now you’re sat at a desk in some grey, gloomy office, shoveling the contents of a Greggs bag into your wilted mouth. Your childhood dreams are merely a distant whisper of the past.
Or are they?
Well, thanks to a permanent exhibition starting at London’s Science Museum this month, your childhood fantasies can come true… kind of.
The museum’s new Tim Peake VR experience will be the Science Museum’s first ever permanent VR exhibition and will allow visitors to strap themselves in next to Peake as he hurtles back down to earth from the International Space Station.
Participants will be able to look around Peake’s cramped space capsule while reentering the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds of up to 25,000km/h.
When Tim Peake returned from the ISS in June last year he was carried by the Soyuz TMA-19M space capsule and touched down in Kazakhstan.
One upside of this being a virtual reality experience is that you won’t actually have to make your way back from a massive field in Eastern Europe, which is quite a trek to be honest.
The VR exhibition will open at the Science Museum in London on the 24 March.
