Bedtime stories are an important part of childhood. And now every child can hear bedtime stories from space!

When you’re a kid, there’s nothing better than going to bed and hearing your favorite story as you drift off to sleep.

Every child has a favorite person to hear stories from. For some, it’s mom. For others, it’s dad. But for a few, it’s an in orbit astronaut.

Thanks to an amazing educational charity, all children can watch and listen to astronauts as they tell children’s bedtime stories.

The charity, named the Global Space Education Foundation, has been running the program, named Story Time From Space, with NASA since 2014.

It works by the charity sending a bunch of children’s books up to the International Space Station. The astronauts then record themselves as they read the books.

The videos of the readings then appear on the Story Time From Space website and YouTube channel.

Most of the books have a space theme, for obvious reasons!

For instance, here’s Story Time From Space’s upload of astronaut Scott Kelly reading the book Mousetronaut:

That book is especially important for the astronaut, as it was written by his brother, former astronaut Mark Kelly. The story is based on Kelly’s first space mission, where one of the mice brought on board for an experiment was especially enthusiastic.

Apart from the facts that the reader is floating around in zero gravity and that the Earth’s oceans and continents are spinning around in the background, it’s a pretty normal reading.

The astronauts have even recorded videos of stories in languages other than English. For instance, Joseph M. Acaba has read Max viaja a Marte, or Max goes to Mars, in Spanish.

And astronaut Koichi Wakata has also read Max goes to the International Space Station in Japanese.

And Story Time From Space has also started adding fun science-based videos from the International Space station.

For instance, one video demonstrates how Newton’s Laws of Motion work on the space station.

It’s hard to deny that Story Time From Space is a great idea. What child wouldn’t want to see and hear stories and experiments that are literally out of this world!?

When you hear about things like Story Time From Space, you have to appreciate that we really are living in a sci-fi wonderland.

In the 1960s, the idea of any child being able to watch astronauts read bedtime stories to them from space any time they liked would have been unthinkable. But nowadays, it exists!

Who knows what amazing things children will have access to in the future? Will they be able to put on VR headsets and instantly see and feel what it’s like to be on the surface of Mars?

Some people think that the internet is a bad thing for children. While it’s true that some things online may be detrimental to healthy childhood development, projects like Story Time From Space show that the opposite is also true.

There are many, many things online that can make children learn and engage with education in innovative ways.

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Source: Bored Panda, Story Time From Space