the essential From November 14, the Cité de l’espace in Toulouse offers new equipment, unique in Europe. “LuneXplorer” will allow visitors to experience a takeoff and a journey to the Moon. This investment of 16 million euros is expected to attract between 30,000 and 40,000 additional visitors each year.
Since 1969, only twelve men have set foot on the Moon. A little more than 50 years after the last Apollo mission (Apollo 17 in 1972), NASA’s Artemis program has put the Earth’s natural satellite back at the center of future space exploration projects: a crew could orbit the Moon around 2025 and another to land there three years later.
For all those who will never board a spaceship, the Cité de l’espace, in Toulouse, has designed a life-size simulator. The result of many years of work and an investment of more than 16 million euros (1), LuneXplorer will welcome its first passengers on November 14 (2).
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The entrance hall of the LuneXplorer building at the Cité de l’espace. DDM – LAURENT DARD
Behind the Mir station, head for a 1,500 m2 building dominated by white and gray which includes the old Terradome. Visitors who enter will not leave indifferent after 40 minutes of a unique experience. Four sequences await them. The first, in the reception hall among spacesuits and models of launchers, aims to immerse them in the Apollo missions to better project them into the news of the Artemis program. Then comes the regrouping in crews of four, under the video instructions of three astronauts from the European Space Agency (ESA), Thomas Pesquet, Matthias Maurer and Samantha Cristoforetti and the first European astronaut and godmother of the Cité de l’espace, Claudie Haigneré. It is then time to take a seat in one of the ten space capsules (up to 2,500 people can be accommodated each day) for the most memorable ten minutes of the program.
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“The pressure crushes you against the seat”
The general director of the Cité de l’espace, Jean-Baptiste Desbois and the astronaut Jean-François Clervoy in a LuneXplorer capsule. DDM – LAURENT DARD
On the same principle as the centrifuge used by astronauts for their training, the experience allows you to feel, with your body pressed to the seat, the pressure of takeoff with an acceleration of 2G. Countdown, acceleration phases, transfer, moon landing, all with requests from the control center and images to admire from the window, the result is truly astonishing. After the debriefing, always conducted by the astronauts, visitors will be able to retrieve personal data from their mission.
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“For the first time, audiences can experience hypergravity. The feeling of being propelled forward, the pressure crushing you against the seat, the difficulty touching the switch or turning your head … This is exactly what I experienced in the American space shuttle, I saw myself leaving again. With, in addition, images of the arrival on the Moon, which I never did “, says Jean-François Clervoy.
The ESA astronaut advises visitors to experience the moment, not as an attraction, but “as if they were real pilots by observing the parameters of speed, altitude, fuel, with the added bonus of external view of the lunar surface.
“Visitors who have experienced the LuneXplorer will be able to say that they know what astronauts feel at the moment of takeoff,” summarizes Jean-Claude Dardelet, vice-president of Toulouse Métropole and president of Semeccel-Cité de l’espace . “The Cité de l’espace was already the best place in the world to explain what space missions are, now we can also come there to feel these issues with our bodies,” adds Sébastien Barde, deputy director of Exploration and Human Flights at CNES, the French space agency, partner of the Cité de l’espace.
(1) LuneXplorer is 55% financed by Toulouse Métropole, 34% by the European Union (FEDER recovery plan), 6% by Semeccel Cité de l’espace and 5% by the Occitanie region.
(2) From November 14 and the opening of LuneXplorer, the full price adult entry ticket to the Cité de l’espace increases from €24.5 to €26. Information for prices and discounts on the site www.cite-espace.com
2023-11-08 13:00:44
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