Live launch from the Planetarium – NASA’s Artemis 1 mission to the moon
Space science and engineering are hard! After delays of several weeks, NASA’s Artemis 1 mission to the moon finally launched today, as we broadcast the event live in our planetarium. A last-minute glitch delayed the launch by just over half an hour, but finally the huge rocket’s engines lit up, and Artemins left the launch pad at 1:50pm Thailand time, leaving behind it a roar and a huge trail of fire, as the rocket’s huge engines accelerated it out of Earth’s atmosphere. At the time of writing the mission is progressing well.
We had a packed planetarium as students of all ages, from primary to secondary waited in growing excitement for the final countdown. At one minute to launch they all counted down the final seconds together.
This was also a great teaching moment. We want the excitement our students felt for this event to translate into excitement for the fields of study they follow. STEM subjects are obviously a target for this excitement. Over the next few weeks our STEM teachers will endeavour to deliver their lectures in the context of what the students saw today. This NASA expedition covers so many subjects: physics, chemistry, biology… NASA is going to the Moon’s South Pole, where water ice was detected by an earlier unmanned mission (LRO: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter). Establishing a permanent moon base will require the knowledge of how to get there and how to live there: physics and mathematics for the trajectory calculations, chemistry and physics for the rocket engines, chemistry and biology for the mining and exploitation of water on the moon to enable a permanent living base, and much more. But it will also require artists and writers to explain the complex science to a wider audience.
At BCIS we believe in fostering all these skills, in the context of space science. And judging by the enthusiasm shown by our students today, we may well have a few future spacemen and women who were BCIS alumni!!
Education changes the world
