Horrible Science: Cosmic Chaos at the Science and Industry Museum

With UK rocket launches, lunar missions and solar eclipses all on the horizon, 2026 is shaping up to be a big year for space. What better timing for Horrible Science: Cosmic Chaos, a world-premiere exhibition at the Science and Industry Museum.

Designed with younger audiences in mind, this large-scale immersive exhibition treats science less like a lesson and more like an adventure. Blending humour, theatrical storytelling and hands-on interaction, it unfolds as a fast-moving journey through the Solar System, where abstract ideas are made tangible through physical experience. The usual museum etiquette – don’t touch, keep quiet – is cheerfully abandoned.

The journey begins in the lair of Dr Big Brain, an overblown evil genius plotting galactic domination, who recruits visitors for a series of escalating challenges. From there, explorers are sucked through a wormhole into the realities of life in orbit. Against sweeping images of Earth taken from space, the exhibition reveals how astronauts eat, sleep and work aboard the International Space Station, grounded by rare objects including Tim Peake’s headset from his 2015 mission, real space food, and a space toilet used on the Soyuz–Mir spacecraft.

Elsewhere, science is encountered through the senses. Visitors wobble through simulated moonquakes, test a micro-gravity optical illusion where they appear to float, and sniff scientists’ best attempts at recreating the smells of space – including unwashed socks. Familiar faces like the Moon character from the Horrible Science TV show (still grumpy that no one’s visited since 1972) will be on hand to guide explorers as they get the opportunity to touch a genuine lunar meteorite, while NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson will help to navigate the Solar System.

Things heat up in Sizzling Sun, a glowing zone where, guided by Isaac Newton, visitors will grapple with gravity, chase solar flares, and get to grips with eclipses and solar storms – before the exhibition zooms out to strange planets, black holes and distant exoplanets. Here, deep space is explored through some of its most extreme phenomena, including the mind-bending physics of “spaghettification”. Highlights include a life-size model of the Beagle 2 lander, a replica of Galileo’s telescope, and a full-scale model of the CHEOPS satellite, whose real counterpart is still searching for planets far beyond our Solar System.

Marking the first time Horrible Science has been realised as a large-scale immersive exhibition, Cosmic Chaos turns complex science into something tangible, deliberately silly, and participatory. Opening first in Manchester before touring to the Science Museum in London, it frames learning not as a passive exercise, but as an active, shared experience.