This is (not) Rocket Science!

Citizen Scientists as Mission Control

The project „This is (not) Rocket Science!” was an institutional platform for researching and helping to shape future issues in space exploration and ran between 2022 and 2025. The starting point here was that today's children and young people will be directly affected by today's space science when they reach adulthood. That is why they were involved as citizen scientists in the project: they conducted research in their own best interests, formulated their needs, developed visions, questioned forecasts, and thus became self-empowered experts on their own future. In workshops, discussions, and design sessions at the Vienna Technical Museum (TMW), they became familiar with key topics, visited players in space science in Austria, and met young scientists from the TU Space Team. “This is (not) Rocket Science!” takes a critical perspective on topics such as democratization, commercialization, equal treatment, and space protection. The project was open-ended, and the research results were also be communicated to a broad public, a.o. an accompanying blog on the project, and an exhibition on the topic of “space” (to be realized in 2027), which will include the project results.

The cooperation with Bildungsgrätzl in Vienna's 15th district enabled collaboration with children and young people of all ages (from kindergarten to high school graduation) and from different socio-economic backgrounds in a peripheral area of Vienna. Here, the young citizen scientists were already experts in designing their own living environments and implementing them in everyday life.

Stimulating questions for the research process with the children and young people were: What will commercial space travel bring? Will there be habitats and biospheres on the moon and/or Mars, and who will be allowed and want to live there? Is a kind of colonization of space imminent? Will we be able to export our collective memory, and if so, what part of it? Are we also exporting environmental pollution into space? Who will be allowed to research, design, build, help shape, and control? Where are the women in space travel? What do we want to know from satellites, what information should they send us? What can we learn from work processes in space travel, how does collaborative cooperation work? Ultimately: What does “quality of life” actually mean on Earth or elsewhere?

Answers to these and other questions form the core of the project, which aimed to explore socio-technological issues of the future. With the expertise of children and young people, new scientific research questions and fields of action were developed and communicated both within the scientific community and to the general public.

This project is already completed.