Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum has reopened its space gallery, with a refurbished exhibition featuring a Zero Gravity Space Lab, which allows visitors to experience the illusion of weightlessness, just like astronauts do on a daily basis.

The updated exhibition features some of the objects used in the museum’s original space exhibition, which opened in 1988, such as rocket motors and moon rock as well as new artefacts including a Soviet flightsuit, spacecraft emergency equipment and an uneaten dinner from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon in 1968.

Visitors are guided through a visit to the International Space Station by Australian astronauts Dr Andy Thomas and his wife Dr Shannon Walker.

It includes an audiovisual presentation which talks about what it is like to live and work on the space station. In the exhibition’s Space Station Habitation Module, visitors can see how astronauts spend their time when they’re not working, before moving into the Zero Gravity Space lab which takes 10 – 12 visitors at one time.

Designed by Melbourne-based company Helifilms, the lab exhibit is one of only two in the world – the other is at the Principe Felipe Museum in Valencia, Spain.