Country Always

Caring for Country

A Corner of the Empire

The Garden Palace

The Holding Pen

The Agricultural Hall

Regional Networks

Across New South Wales

A Museum of Doing

Technological Museum

Expanding Stories

Evolution of the Castle Hill site from botanical research station to Museum Discovery Centre

Transforming the Tramsheds

Powerhouse Stage 1 and the Harwood Building

A Symbol in Time

Sydney Observatory

Ongoing Transformations

Powerhouse Ultimo

Applied Arts and Sciences

Defining the terms in the 21st century

Future Space – To Boldly Go

Sydney Science Festival 2022

Powerhouse Renewal

A transformative renewal program across four sites

We Rise

Blak Powerhouse

Powerhouse-1 Mission Launch to the ISS

An initiative of the Powerhouse: Future Space program

2024

Exoskeleton

Powerhouse Parramatta

Powerhouse Parramatta Topping Out

Major construction milestone achieved for the new museum

2023

Stories

Future Space – To Boldly Go

Sydney Science Festival 2022

With astronaut Mary Ellen Weber

Launch view of the STS-70 space shuttle Discovery

‘When you step foot on Mars, will you invite me so I can sit in your audience and I can watch your video and hear your stories?’

Mary Ellen Weber, NASA Astronaut

Woman wearing purple jumper, blue pants and white socks floats in mid air in a space capsule in a yoga position

As you can imagine, astronauts get to do some very cool things. The most cool thing that we get to do is, every once in a while, we get to fly into space. For me, the very second best thing about being an astronaut is actually having the chance to share the experience and the promise and the future of space with people all over the world, not just my friends and family. But that's why I'm so excited to be here tonight. And what a treat for me to help open Science Week here and the Sydney Science Festival. Now, I am going to share with you my own personal journeys and my experiences in space, but I also am going to take a little bit of time after to talk about where we're going, because we are going to some very exciting places and doing some very exciting things. And no matter how fortunate I've been to experience what I've experienced, what lies ahead for the young people that are here tonight is even so much greater.

Now, before I talk about what it’s like to be in space and about my own missions, I want to take a minute and talk about how it is that we get to space, because very many people don’t quite understand this. They think that to go into space means you go up really high, that if you go really high, there you are in space. And I guess that’s technically true.

You will be in space, but it will only be for a very brief time because this big force of gravity that allows me to stand here in front of you instead of float, this big force of gravity would pull anything up high, would pull it right back down to the ground. So we don’t go into space by going high. We go there by going fast, crazy, crazy, fast.

So think about it, if you’ve ever thrown a ball before in your life in a straight line, you know exactly what it does. It starts out in a straight line. But then that force of gravity will pull it back to earth in a curve, in an arc. The slower that ball is going, the steeper that curve is. But the faster that ball goes, the shallower that curve gets. So you could imagine that you could throw a baseball or a spaceship or an astronaut so fast that that curve, while they’re falling towards Earth, is so shallow that it's actually larger than the size of the Earth. It's still falling towards earth. Gravity is still there, but it's going around and around the world. It's missing the earth while it falls towards it.