North Texas Space Walk

Several years ago, my son and his family were visiting us for Thanksgiving, and we had the idea to build a scale model of the solar system in our neighborhood. We used a tennis ball to represent the sun, and then found object that would represent all the planets (and yes we included Pluto even though technically it isn’t a planet.

With the sun the size of a tennis ball, the inner planets were simply dots on post-it notes, all within 30 ft. or so of the tennis ball, and Pluto landing about 300 yards away. We went out and placed the tennis ball and walked off the distance to all the planets. The kids absolutely loved doing it!

Ever since, I have been thinking about how much fun it would be to do a larger scale model of the solar system where Earth was bigger than a little dot on a piece of paper, but I never really followed up on the idea.

Fast forward to earlier this year. My wife and our youngest son were sitting around and we started talking about how much fun that solar system model was to build and how excited the grandkids got about doing it. We pulled up a video of the model of the solar system that Sweden has built on a MUCH larger scale (available here).

Then I got to thinking about how cool it would be to try something similar to that in the Dallas area. We started thinking about how big we could make the scale, and how we would be able to make a sun big enough to make Earth larger than just a marble.

Then my wife said – “What about the ball on top of Reunion Tower?”

And the idea was born.

At 118′ in diameter, raised up high in the air, and instantly recognizable by anyone familiar with the Dallas area, it seemed almost perfect.

When we realized that Earth on this scale would be the size of a desktop globe, it felt perfect in our minds, and we decided to start planning to actually build this scale model.

And so the North Texas Space Walk was born.

Today we are working with partners to try to locate locations where we can place the planets in the solar system.

Once we find locations for all the planets, we will begin fundraising and reaching out to artists to design and build the representations for each of the planets.

In the future we would like to add other objects (like Ceres and some of the moons of the larger planets).

We are excited to try to bring this model into the North Texas area. We think it will be something that will be a great educational opportunity and get people excited thinking about the scope of the solar system in which we live.

If you are interested in helping us get off the ground, drop us a line. We would love to find other people who could share our passion for visualizing our little corner of the galaxy.