Exposition Mission spatiale à la Cité des sciences

The Cité des sciences et de l'industrie launches its permanent exhibition devoted to space exploration. Step into the shoes of an astronaut and live a waking dream for the length of your visit. An adventure during which you will discover the reality and complexity of space missions.

Mission spatiale is an invitation to a journey through time and space. It offers a glimpse of the opportunities space holds, but also of its limits. The exhibition, whose route unfolds across five sections, presents an overview of research, technologies and reflections surrounding space missions.

Explore

Human and robotic space exploration are inseparable

In this first section, visitors discover objects that go where humans cannot go, for reasons of safety or timescale. Probes and rovers collect images and sounds and analyse atmospheres or rock samples, but they also prepare the way for human arrival.

Voyage

Set off to prepare a drilling mission on Europa, a moon of Jupiter located millions of kilometres from Earth. Through this show, experience a space expedition from liftoff to landing. From discovering launch vehicles to choosing the propulsion mode, and calculating trajectories along the way, reality is far from resembling science-fiction films!

Transit

Are you familiar with Artemis? This programme made it possible, at the end of 2022, to send the Orion spacecraft aloft using the SLS launcher. Orion successfully completed its first uncrewed voyage around the Moon, paving the way for a future crewed mission. Discover a replica of Orion and another of I-HAB, the European habitat module of the Lunar Gateway space station.

Stay

Here, visitors travel into the future, set foot on the Moon and wander through an established base. How can one live self-sufficiently there, using the resources found on site and recycling as much as possible? What architectural solutions allow us to adapt to lunar constraints? Through a multimedia game, step into the shoes of an astronaut training to live a day on Mars.

Question

Step back. The floor goes to the experts: an astrophysicist, a sociologist or a geopolitical analyst.