Cité de l'Espace — Local services in Toulouse

For anyone interested in space or weather. Lots of fun and cool interactive exhibits. You can walk around the Mir space station, sit in the style of chair an astronaut sits in for 6 hours to reach the International Space Station (very cramped and uncomfortable) and try out how it feels to walk like an astronaut under zero gravity. This is amongst many , many other things to do here. Exhibits are spread around inside and outside.

It is reasonably expensive for entry ~€20 per adult, however in my opinion this place is worth the cost. You can easily spend an entire day here and not run out of things to do or to look at. There are lots of hands-on exhibits to keep children interested and plenty for adults too.

The Imax show lasted 30 minutes and was about the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet and his time on the ISS and was very interesting. Later in the museum there are some of his clothing and pack items, in addition to his spacesuit on display from his time on the ISS. The spacesuits are made to fit each individual as are the seats they sit in to travel to the space station. You can understand why, when you realise they have to sit for six hours in the fetal position in these seats.

The planetarium was fantastic, the audience were enthralled and the 1 hour show passed very quickly indeed. Part of the presentation was interactive and the presenter was interesting and engaged the audience. Everyone sitting around seemed to have really enjoyed it and if you didn't speak French there were headsets which translated the talk to English, Spanish, German and perhaps Italian.

Exhibits with text included both English and Spanish translations in addition to French and usually an option to choose the spoken language for vocal exhibits to either French, English or Spanish.

We chose to eat at the snack bar in the Astralie building, it was fairly busy but the staff were friendly and smiling. My husband had a bagel formule, bagel with tuna salad, crisps, Coke zero and a coffee. I had tuna salad, piece of bread, a Coke zero and a coffee. The bill was around €22 which seemed reasonable and comparable to other tourist attractions. The food was fresh, nicely presented and we had no complaints about quality.

For those who are likely to want to visit several times, a year pass for an adult is 35€, so for even 2 visits in a year it is worth buying a year's pass. Family annual tickets available too.

We loved this place and had a great time, we would have spent more time there but had been there since it opened in the morning at 10, so by 6 in the evening it was time to leave. We will...

Great experience also for adults with no kids.

All information and description signs, interactive experiences and such were also available in English and Spanish. For the IMAX movie we also got a headset with an English translation.

The only things which were only in French were spoken shows (which makes sense of course)

Overall they put a lot of effort into making it accessible to non French speakers.

Our highlights were: The MIR mockup which you can walk thorough and also has a small exhibition about the pop culture around the time mir flew. Also gives a good dose of nostalgia, depending on your age. The film showing a few of the images obtained by JWST on a huge IMAX screen. You've probably seen these images before but it just hits different. Ariane 5 full size model Lunar model full size model Full size model of the curiosity mars rover, which I think they also drive but we didn't have time to see it. Engines from the Ariane program A lot of interactive experiences in the main building for hands on learning and videos that you can pick and such.

We were there on a weekday and had a lot of children groups but you can navigate a bit around them. We went inside the exhibition building closer to closing time and by then had it pretty much...

Overall nice experience.

First of all, I consider that is relatively easy for someone to go there by public transport (of course will need to walk for about 10 minutes but on a nice path).

What we paid was €19.50 for a reduced ticket for students. We spent 5 and a half hours in the museum.

For me, the best part was LuneXplore (I think it is spelled like this) which was a simulation of participating in lunar exploration.

It had many things to do, many of which included the Planetarium and the IMAX. So the time passes fast. I would recommend it for sure for families with kids over 7 years old, as it would be very inspiring for them. You learn some things, but in case you are familiar with some of the concepts you would probably know most of them and would be repetition. Ideally, if you speak French would be very great but you can go if you speak English or Spanish.

My overall personal review in a phrase would be: "Maybe a bit overpriced, but it is worth for sure the visit if your kids (if you have) speak French or you are a fan of physics...