Photo: Daniel Stauch | Deutsches Museum
Space and Time
Ready for the Final Frontier?
An old dream is within reach: humans are using asteroids as a source of raw materials, colonising Mars and travel to distant galaxies.
But the human body is not made for life in space and not all technical questions have been solved so far.
Will we colonise space only with machines? An object that has already left the Earth once must therefore not be missing: The Soviet Foton 1 space capsule completed its unmanned, twelve-day flight through space back in 1985. The knowledge gained then still inspires the imagination today. Thus, ring-shaped space stations that can generate artificial gravity first appeared in science fiction. Today, NASA is actively researching their feasibility, as a model of the "Nautilus-X" space station shows.
Research is also being conducted into connecting orbital space stations via space elevators; initial developments such as the WARR can transport four times their own weight. How does it feel to steer a Mars rover on an exploration trip? The hands-on station reveals it.
