The Cade Launches into Space

The Cade to launches into Outer Space this Summer 

At a museum not so far way, visitors of all ages will soon experience the stellar amazement of our mysterious Milky Way galaxy.  

Wandering the Milky Way: A Tour of the Solar System is set to take off as the new summer theme at the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention on Thursday, June 2, invading every space of the Cade through January 2023. 

With immersive experiences and hands-on discoveries, Wandering the Milky Way offers the perfect escape from Florida’s sweltering summer heat. Museum visitors can cool off in climate-controlled, state-of-the-art comfort while delving into the lives of inventors who made breakthrough discoveries about our neighboring planets, as well as other far-out features of our solar system and beyond.  

Expect to travel from Jupiter’s swirling red spot to the icy geysers on Neptune’s moon Triton. Learn about the inventors who’ve used robots, rockets, and rovers to take the people of Earth on a tour of our galactic neighbors. Perhaps, most exciting of all, Wandering the Milky Way provides a glimpse of how humanity explores outer space. In the featured exhibit, Voyages: A Trip through Time and Space, guests will learn about Voyagers 1 and 2 and how they are still broadcasting back to Earth as they travel farther into space than any manmade object. 

The new museum-wide theme will feature not just exhibit panels and interactives, but also a host of space-themed activities. Little ones get a chance to construct a spacesuit from a plastic egg, make galactic slime, and find out why potatoes make excellent astronaut fuel. 

Families, jet to the Petty Gallery, where the Astronaut Academy is enlisting kids for an out-of-this-world mission. In the area designed especially for the Cade’s youngest guests, kids can send a parachute flying in a wind tube and crawl around an obstacle course.  

Of course, no museum exploration would be complete without an introduction to Neil Armstrong (1930– 2012), an American aerospace engineer, test pilot and astronaut who flew on the Apollo missions and first set foot on the moon. To get a sense of what it was like to take that famous lunar step, one activity invites kids and kids-at-heart to make an impression in a pile of moon sand. 

Even the Cade’s Fab Lab has gone outer limits to investigate how technological innovations will lead to even larger leaps for humankind. In the lab, guests can build a rover and test it on alien terrain, while discovering the secret code hidden on the Mars rover. Ye olde printing press is getting in on the action too, printing stories for guests that cover topics related to space. 

“The Cade Museum offers a learning experience that you won’t find anywhere else,” says Bailes. “We call it our Inventivity™ Framework. We take a non-traditional, multidisciplinary approach to teaching science. We teach STEM concepts with art, creativity, and play, and most importantly through the lens of invention. When kids ask ‘why do I need to know this?’ we can show them a product they really care about or an invention that has changed their lives. We bring that science concept to life in a way that is meaningful. And most importantly, it’s fun. Everyone loves to create and build and stretch their imaginations. We hope our visitors have a blast launching into the world of space exploration.” 

For more information about the Cade Museum’s upcoming exhibits and programming, visit cademuseum.org. 

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