To the Moon and back

What has Nasa done for you lately? Besides Tang, I mean. The space agency gets this question all the time. Seriously.

Or so says Margaret Weitekamp, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, where a new exhibition hopes to answer that very question.

That, and a few others, including “What should I pack for a trip to Mars?'' (Hint: Leave the family dog at home).

He'll use up too much precious oxygen on the trip there and back. But do take the treadmill along. Leg muscles can atrophy in a weightless environment.)

Zoom into the future

These and other burning issues are addressed in Space: A Journey to Our Future.

Partly paid for by Nasa, whose 50th anniversary is being celebrated at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the show is a bit of a departure from museum tradition.

Meaning that, instead of looking back at the history of avionics and space science, this one looks ahead, to stuff that has not happened.

There is a fancy name for that sort of thing. In museum parlance, it is called a “notional concept''.

If you visit the show's Moon habitat, you will be standing in the middle of one. It is a walk-through model of where people might one day live while doing lunar research.

And it includes a tiny bunk bed you can actually climb into (claustrophobics, beware!) and a kitchen stocked with such delicacies as a Denver omelette that comes out of a plastic container. It is science fiction at this point.

Though maybe not for long.

As the show points out, the idea of living on the Moon (or Mars, for that matter) for extended periods is getting pretty serious consideration these days at Nasa.

More than one of the show's high-tech, arcade-style interactive displays drive home that point, including a touch screen game module that challenges you to stock the cargo hold of a Mars-bound ship, weighing the utility of such items as a mobile phone versus fuel.

Another game lets you design a Martian base camp from the ground up, a la SimCity.

Where to eat on the Red Planet? Choices include building a burger joint. One whiz-bang feature invites you to build your own spacecraft, using your index finger as a virtual mouse.

Just point at a computer screen several feet away and select rocket components by “clicking'' on them and dragging them into place in midair.

Have I mentioned that the target audience for the exhibit is children?

After all, what adult would dare allow himself or herself to be weighed in public?

Here, specially calibrated scales compare your Earth weight with your weight on the Moon and Mars. Feeling bloated after that lunch at McDonald's? Step on the Moon scale first, where 160 pounds melt away to, oh, about 30.

All about edu-tainment

Developed by Evergreen Exhibitions in consultation with museum staff, the show is yet another example of the increasingly common form of museum display known as edu-tainment.

Think of it as medicine, with a heaping spoonful of sugar.

According to the museum's senior curator for space history, Roger Launius, that translates into an exhibition that has to perform the neat trick of appealing to three kinds of visitors simultaneously: “streakers'', as Launius calls them, who rush through in ten minutes; “strollers'', who take a bit more time to digest the information; and the increasingly rare but slower-moving “searchers''.

It is that last category — the foot-dragging, wall-text-reading space cadets — for whom this journey will be most satisfying.

It is possible that somewhere among the touch screen-tapping middle-school crowd there may just be a handful of scientists of tomorrow.

Space: A Journey to Our Future is on display at the National Air and Space Museum. For more details, log on to http://www.nasm.si.edu