This is another one that's going to be written up at greater length for Interactions, but on Friday I had a very interesting day at the National Space Centre in Leicester, which I visited to cover their new "Space Academy" educational programmes.
British and American rocket boosters in the National Space Centre's canteen
The idea is to use space as a hook to provide curriculum support for pupils from Key Stage 2 right up to post-16 education. The Centre's position as both a working facility and an educational institution makes it a great choice of location -- and they've got some interesting items lying around: some solar cells from Hubble that were retrieved in 1993 after becoming unusable following micrometeorite bombardment, a test-tube of dust from a Martian meteorite and the logbook from the unsuccessful Beagle mission to Mars, which worked from the Centre. And the two disused rocket boosters decorating the canteen.
I had to chuckle, though, after viewing the animated film on the life cycle of stars in their Space Theatre. Though produced by the Centre's in-house team, the show had been commissioned by a planetarium in Nashville -- which meant that describing the development of stars using the word "evolution" was expressly forbidden, as was any reference to the Big Bang.
