Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 25, 1994                   TAG: 9410250052
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MOON EXHIBIT PUTS SPACE TRAVEL IN PERSPECTIVE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

The bean bag, lava lamp, rotary phone and eight-track tape player were all too familiar. They reminded Braaden of her living room 25 years ago.

"That living room [in the exhibit] looked like mine," said Fishburn Park Elementary School teacher Braaden, who toured the exhibit with about 20 children in tow.

Braaden's deja vu was no accident.

The mock living room she was standing in was from the '60s, and it was designed to make people like Braaden remember July 20, 1969 - the day the United States put a man on the moon.

"My sister was visiting from Greensboro, and we were sitting in my living room," said Braaden, remembering when she first saw Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.

But the science museum's "One Giant Leap: Our Journey to the Moon" exhibit is not only there to remind, it's also there to teach.

"Anyone who is 26 or younger probably doesn't remember,'' said Judy Hensley, the museum's exhibits director. ``For them there has never been a time when there wasn't space travel, so there is no sense of wonder or excitement like what we had. Shuttle went up, shuttle went down. It's no big deal [to them].

"We want to retell the story so they have some understanding of what an incredible accomplishment space travel was. In 10 years, we went from military rockets to space travel. It's important to realize how much that took," she said.

Color photos and text housed in bright blue displays help to walk even the smallest of visitors through the steps that led to Armstrong's 1969 leap, by chronicling missions like Sam's, a chimpanzee in a biopack, in 1959, the Freedom 7's mission in 1961, and other Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.

And contributions from Roanoke residents like Betty Ellwood, who donated her stamp collection, and George Marshall, who gave his photos of the moon, help bring the exhibit home to visitors.

But it's the interactive displays that capture the imaginations and attention of the exhibit's younger explorers.

The line stays long at the video phone.

By dialing a code, a person can call one of three mock space stations. And when the person at the other end picks up, they can hear each other through the telephone receiver and see each other on a television monitor.

A table with Lego building blocks and bulky gloves is another favorite.

Kids and adults alike slip on the thick, white gloves and attempt to assemble the blocks.

They're just fun games, until they read further and realize videophones like the ones they were playing with are what astronauts used to communicate with Earth, and the gloves they clumsily manipulated the blocks with are like the ones astronauts had to wear.

That gave Colin Schlueter a new perspective on what it's like being an astronaut.

"It must be really hard to push buttons and do their jobs with those gloves on," said Schlueter, a Fishburn Park student. "I didn't think it would be that hard."

And in case they missed the significance of the "games" the first time around, a computer set up near the end of the exhibit reiterates. It quizzes visitors on what they've seen, asking questions like, "Which president challenged the country to send the first man to the moon?"

The correct response - John F. Kennedy - prompts the computer to play a video reel in the monitor's upper left-hand corner of JFK's challenge to the nation. An incorrect guess still gets the video, plus a polite message that you were wrong, and the right answer.

Betsy Williams, the museum's visitor services coordinator, is the final information safety net. After each group visits - there have been 14 schools so far, she's there to explain and reinforce what they saw.

"I explain the spin-offs to them like Velcro closures on their shoes and Nintendo games. None of that would've come about as quickly without NASA and the government's funding for NASA," Williams said.

Hensley admits it's a lot of information for anyone to absorb. But she said getting everything isn't the exhibit's point.

"Even if students come away and say, `I saw a cool spacesuit,' they got something from it," Hensley said.

The traveling exhibit opened Oct. 1, and it will be at the Science Museum until March 25, when it will be replaced by an exhibit on baby dinosaurs.

The exhibit costs $4 for adults and $2.50 for children, except on the second Friday of every month when the museum is free from 3:30 to 8 p.m. Special group rates are available.

One Giant Leap: Our Journey to the Moon: Through March 25 at the Science Museum of Western Virginia, Center in the Square. Call 343-7876 for recorded information on exhibits, programs. 342-5710.