Destination Space is a national STEM programme created and run by ASDC and funded by the UK Space Agency. The first phase of this national programme ran from 2014 to 2017 and engaged, inspired and involved families with school-age children, school groups and teachers, and communities across the UK with the amazing stories, science and achievements of human spaceflight and Tim Peake’s Principia mission. Overall 733,017 children and adults took part in this ASDC programme in the first 15 months of delivery and many more continue to do so today.
This new six month programme builds on all this training, knowledge and enthusiasm for space science and exploration currently in science centres across the UK, and ensures delivery of this content continues well into the future. Specifically, this programme will focus on celebrating the science and engineering of the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the new Mars rover for the ExoMars mission, and will introduce satellite applications and the plans to enable space launches from the UK. It will also develop content more widely that can be used by multiple partners and ASDC in future projects around space science.
The programme invited applications from UK science centres and museums in January 2018 – from Eden in Cornwall to the Scottish Science Centres, and from W5 in Belfast to the Science Museum in London. Five centres were selected and were trained in March 2018 to run this cutting-edge schools and families programme into the future.
The five centres delivering the Destination Space 2 programme are: