BEIJING, July 23 (Xinhua) — Wandering via a brief exhibition on lunar exploration held on the China Science and Technology Museum (CSTM), an 11-year-old boy surnamed Huang from north China’s Hebei Province was nonetheless fascinated about the digital journey he had simply taken.
“The VR exhibit showcased a future moon base. It felt so real,” Huang mentioned. “I hope I can go there one day.”
Jointly staged by the CSTM and the China National Space Administration, the exhibition places actual spacecraft parts on show, together with a backup of the tailor-designed nationwide flag as soon as displayed on the moon’s floor in 2020 by the Chang’e-5 mission, China’s first lunar sample-return mission, a pattern of the high-performance alloy dubbed “Chang’e steel,” and a business rocket engine.
It additionally provides an immersive digital actuality expertise that lets guests journey, from a researcher’s perspective, to a lunar base within the 12 months 2049.
“We heard the museum had this exhibition, so we brought our child here,” mentioned Huang’s father, who marveled at how the youthful technology has entry to space science schooling assets that had been past his attain as a baby.
“When I was young, I had heard of the Long March rockets. Later, Yang Liwei went into space, and I felt China’s space program was becoming more and more advanced,” the daddy mentioned. “Back then, we could only learn vaguely from the news that China had satellites and rockets capable of reaching space.”
Yang was China’s first astronaut to enter space in October 2003.
The expertise of Huang’s household captures a broader shift in summer season science studying — achievements that might solely be adopted from afar many years in the past at the moment are being was experiences kids can entry firsthand.
That shift is seen past Beijing. In Hefei, the capital of east China’s Anhui Province, the Anhui Museum staged an exhibition that situates modern space exploration throughout the for much longer historical past of historic Chinese tradition’s remark and questioning of “heaven.”
Running via Oct. 20, the exhibition brings collectively almost 300 cultural relics and exhibits from 48 museums and analysis establishments. Ancient astronomical devices are displayed alongside fashions of the Yutu lunar rover and China’s space station, in addition to lunar soil introduced again by the Chang’e-6 mission in 2024 — humanity’s first samples ever collected from the moon’s far aspect.
Animations, demonstrations of astronomical devices and interactive installations on the exhibition assist guests navigate refined topics stretching from historic timekeeping and celestial remark to fashionable deep-space exploration.
Unlike the exhibition in Hefei that connects present-day missions with centuries of skywatching, the Nanning Science and Technology Museum, within the capital metropolis of south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, locations larger emphasis on participation. It is providing a “my space dream” summer season camp that introduces kids to the event of China’s space program and permits them to expertise simulated astronaut coaching.
Such applications are a part of a wider effort to increase science studying past formal school rooms. At the CSTM alone, greater than 220 exhibit demonstrations and academic actions are scheduled on a median day, overlaying topics together with spaceflight, chemistry and synthetic intelligence.
China has positioned larger emphasis on science popularization and schooling. Its Science and Technology Popularization Law, revised in 2024, locations science popularization on an equal footing with scientific and technological innovation and encourages its integration with tradition, tourism and different sectors.
According to the National Development and Reform Commission, China trains greater than 5 million graduates within the fields of science, expertise, engineering, and arithmetic annually. Its science and expertise workforce has surpassed 110 million folks, in accordance to a 2022 report from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Those figures describe the far finish of the nation’s expertise pipeline. Science museums function a lot earlier in that course of, turning main nationwide initiatives and generally summary scientific concepts into experiences that kids can see, query and bear in mind.
For Huang’s dad and mom, spaceflight was as soon as a distant nationwide story encountered via the information. On this summer season day, their son stepped out of a digital lunar base talking not solely about the place China had been, but additionally about the place he hoped to go.■