UNTIL SUNDAY 11/6
CAIXAFORUM. Eduardo Primo Yúfera, 1A
After visiting Apollo 11. Man's arrival on the moon It is impossible not to end up feeling attracted to space missions, no matter how little we are interested., a priori, the exploration of other worlds. Because the latest Caixaforum exhibition in Valencia invites us to sit in the command module of a space rocket and see (through virtual reality glasses) what's in it, shows us what astronauts eat (vacuum dehydrated foods), how to brush your teeth, what do they do with their feces and urine, and what they were wearing the day they set foot on the moon that July 20, 1969 of the great step for humanity. It turns out that the hatch of the lunar module Eagle, a slice two meters in diameter that was perched on the star for just 22 hours, opened to the right, which made it more likely that Neil Armstrong would emerge from the tiny cubicle first—and not Buzz Aldrin., the other pilot—and first he will leave his mark. It wasn't the only reason: Armstrong was older, the captain and a civilian (Aldrin was a career military man), and it was convenient to give a peaceful image of the project in the midst of the space race marked by the Cold War.
They wore very elaborate suits in a tiny space and Aldrin, in a bad move, broke the ascending control, that had to be activated with the tip of a pen. After 22 hours of work (only two on the moon), having slept a few on the ground and the head of the engine (there were no seats), the eagle left its legs behind, He hooked himself again to the bow of the mothership where Michael Collins was waiting and set course for Earth.. The capsule landed in the Pacific Ocean and its occupants had to put on biological isolation suits and remain in quarantine for more than two weeks due to the remote possibility that they had brought germs of extraterrestrial origin.. The photos where the confined astronauts talk to their families on the phone behind a peephole close this exhibition about an inevitably epic story that is not so different from the race that Amundsen and Scott fought to reach the South Pole first.. An astrolabe was also used to land on the moon.
It is always good to start with the origins, and this exhibition does so by exhibiting the replica of one of the telescopes with which Galileo discovered in the 1610 the four satellites of Jupiter or the first photo of the far side of the moon, blurry but extraordinary. Then come interactive screens to see up close that mousse that is the moon with all its geographical features in detail., a model of the Saturn rocket, the most powerful and reliable ever built, the stratonautical spacesuit, precursor to the space suit, built by the military engineer Emilio Herrera in 1935, the space suit used by NASA between 1968 y 1975, an experiment that simulates how a rocket launch works by mixing water (kerosene) and air (liquid oxygen) and a very visual display of the distance between the Earth and the moon that gives us an idea of the vacuum that prevails in the Solar System. Solid is the exception. Caixaforum takes us on a walk through the galaxy recreating a mission whose scientific scope was very limited, but it had a symbolic power like few others in the history of humanity. S.M.
