(KCPW News) NASA is in Salt Lake City for the weekend with its traveling exhibit “Driven to Explore.” The free exhibit is set up outside the Leonardo, where visitors can touch a piece of moon rock and learn more about space exploration. Guy King rotates solar panels and thermal radiators for the International Space Station. He’s excited to introduce visitors to the work that’s being done at NASA.
“Basically what they will learn is what the space station looks like,” he says. “Also, you’ll see some of the effects of what space does on the human body. And then you’ll see what we have planned to do on planets like Mars or the moon.”
He adds visitors can also take a look at the latest concept for taking people up to the space station from earth.
Former U.S. Senator and astronaut Jake Garn stopped by to see the exhibit and talk to visitors about his 1985 mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Garn says space travel changes attitudes and makes the world a better place to live.
“Well one of the things you certainly realize, how tiny the planet earth is,” he says. “You look out into space. There are more galaxies out there than all the individual grains of sand on every beach on earth. And so you look back and earth and think, it doesn’t make any sense the way we treat each other. The wars we’ve had. Artificial differences based on whether you’ve got hair or are bald like I am, make no sense at all.”
Garn says if someone like him from Richfield, Utah got to orbit the earth 110 times at 25 times the speed of sound, they can as well, stressing the value of education and harnessing rapid technological change.
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