Space Expo — Attraction in Noordwijk

The experience is hugely disappointing. Kids are promised a series of experiments and handed an envelope full of bits and bobs to this effect. It amounts to 2 pieces of paper and a straw used to make a glorified paper plane, and a sheet of A4 cut into 8 (rectangular) pieces that served as a jigsaw puzzle. The experiments, I guess, are a few multiple choice questions on screens dotted around the halls.

There's a mixture of real space items and models; it's not always clear which is which. A lot of the exhibition on-screen videos are pretty much an Andre Kuipers show where he and a presenter had a series of videos on show with heavily dumbed-down presentations of what it’s like in space.

For kids, there's very little interaction. For older kids and adults, there’s very little meat. I’ve no idea who the target audience is; sadly, Space Expo sits uncomfortably between young and old.

A clear example of this is right at the start where there is a series of peepholes which let you see a picture of a planet or the moon of a planet. Many of the peepholes are placed well above 1 meter in height, so beyond the reach of young children. Yet older children (and adults) who can reach those peepholes are left wanting more than a simple of photo and a few lines of small text.

The exhibition is much smaller than we expected and many areas / exhibits were closed or didn't work; we were outside of the exhibition before we knew it.

I wouldn’t say Space Expo is worth a visit in itself, but if combined with visiting friends in the neighbourhood, or if there’s some time to kill after seeing other nearby museums in the area, it might be worth popping in for an hour or two.

On the plus side, the parking is free and we got free entry thanks to our...

I didn’t like it, for 13€ per adult I was expecting a bit more quality show, it has a show area of about 200 square meters in where is included a Star Wars site?? and a Antartic expedition trip?? Furthermore the Dutch memorandum of Space trips is not translated so you will need to know Dutch to know what is there about, the explanations are super basic, is not audio guide available and if you want some of the personal guides you need to book it in advance, no options are given at the reception to make the visit more interesting (like they didn’t care much to make Space science more attractive to the general public)

Is a shuttle bus available on the weekends which you can go but only doing a combination of the main ticket with the shutle bus ticket, if you go during the week you will need to pay again the complete price (main ticked+ shutle bus) to be able to go on the shutle during the weekend (just a piece of information).

At the entrance I also found the stuff not very friendly nor either very helpful, needing to ask every single detail of how it works that place, it could work better with automatic machines to sell tickets, at least if the human side didn’t do any extra.

No one likes to give opinions like this but is how I felt and when I pay I have the right to enjoy (which I didn’t), I went to many Space shows around the globe and this was a big disappointing after drive from Amsterdam completely in porpoise.

Hope that you guys can improve the experience with this kind of orientations, it took me good 10 minutes for free to give you points to improve, only if this is being checked by someone over...

An extraordinary museum of space exploration stuffs in Noorwijk, Netherlands. Plenty of parking areas with wheelchair accessible parking too. There are cafeteria and merchandise corner on the entrance lobby. After pay for 17€ each visitor can get through the large expo hall where we find some videos of space sciences. Next door, there are some panels of mission simulation with some space probes floating all above. If you want to follow the sequence, before overexcited with the big rockets, you must go to 'the clean room'. There we can build our own probes interactively on the computer panels, I chose Gaia. After finishing the space probe mission, you can take a picture in front of rocket miniatures, whilst the biggest combustion engine will launch every one hour! Just check the count down above it. However for me the most interesting site is the replica of International Space Station, with the cupola spot, the monumental spot for every astronaut 🧑‍🚀 How amazing! If you're attracted by weather and satellite things, go to the next section. Then, the last part is the moon landing stage, complete with re-entry capsule simulator and moon jumper camera. Unfortunately we'll must go by ourselves without guidance to do what first. If you wanna be an astronaut like me, this is a recommended...