World Space Week: what to give a child?

Since 2000, World Space Week has been cel­e­brat­ed around the world, tak­ing place from 4 to 10 Octo­ber. Love for space, rock­ets and world dis­cov­er­ies in this area often appears in child­hood, because a huge world of the unknown and mys­te­ri­ous opens up before the child. We decid­ed to pick up inter­est­ing gifts for chil­dren that you can give them dur­ing the World Space Week, and at the same time tell a lit­tle about what dis­cov­er­ies have been made since the con­quest of out­er space by man.

INTERESTING! On Decem­ber 6, 1999, the UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly pro­claimed World Space Week as an annu­al hol­i­day. Why were the dates cho­sen — from 4 to 10 Octo­ber? This choice is based on two impor­tant dates in the his­to­ry of astro­nau­tics. On Octo­ber 4, 1957, the first arti­fi­cial Earth satel­lite, Sputnik‑1, was launched, and on Octo­ber 10, 1967, an out­er space treaty was signed, which states that no coun­try can place nuclear weapons in space, and also can­not present the right to own a cos­mic body or its part.

What to tell the child?

This year the theme of World Space Week is “Satel­lites make life bet­ter”, so we have col­lect­ed the most inter­est­ing facts about satel­lites for you and invite you to share them with your child.

• If your child likes to watch the car­toon “Tom and Jer­ry”, then be sure to tell him that NASA has two satel­lites con­stant­ly chas­ing each oth­er in Earth­’s orbit — they are also called car­toon char­ac­ters. By con­stant­ly mea­sur­ing the dis­tance between them, sci­en­tists can track grav­i­ta­tion­al anom­alies.
• What would hap­pen if cell phones stopped work­ing in the world? It’s good that we don’t know about this, but in 1998, due to the fact that one of the satel­lites failed, about 80% of pagers around the world stopped work­ing. Imag­ine what it was like to be out of touch!
• Sci­en­tists pro­gram satel­lites in such a way that they do not col­lide with mete­orites. Just imag­ine that out of more than 8,000 satel­lites that are in Earth orbit, only one was destroyed by a mete­orite.
• The satel­lite, launched more than 60 years ago, Avangard‑1, still revolves around the Earth at an alti­tude of 650 to 3800 km. Its size is the size of a grape­fruit.
• Thanks to satel­lites, weath­er fore­casts have become 15 times more accu­rate: they can detect the onset of rain and snow and pre­dict the weath­er for the next 14 days.

What to give a child?

If you want to make space a lit­tle clos­er for a child, then you can give him real­is­tic toys — a space rock­et, a space shut­tle with an astro­naut, a real space sta­tion, a space­ship cap­sule and a plan­e­tary rover. And this is not just a toy — these are whole sets, each of which includes an astro­naut (or even two) and oth­er details. The game will not only be edu­ca­tion­al, but also sto­ry-dri­ven. After col­lect­ing a whole col­lec­tion, you can build a space sta­tion and play out var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions that hap­pen to astro­nauts.

Let your child dream of out­er space!