Earlier this month, Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield found himself a Youtube star after posting a little film of himself singing David Bowie’s song Space Oddity.

At the time, he was floating in the International Space Station about 200 miles above planet Earth. He had been there for nearly five months, during which time he had conducted a question-and-answer session with Canadian school children as well as the country’s Prime Minister Steven Harper.

The 53-year-old space man’s performance amused the world and was acknowledged by Bowie himself. Britain will have its own space oddity in 2015 when Major Tim Peake blasts off from the Kazakh desert to become this country’s first visitor to the International Space Station.

One man with big hopes for Major Tim is Dr John Baruch at Bradford University, the man who created the Robotic Telescope programme for schools and one of the academics behind the University’s soon-to-be opened £1.3m STEM centre.

As the T&A reported last year, the purpose built-centre is equipped for the teaching of science, technology, engineering and maths to school children.

“It’s about getting kids interested,” Dr Baruch said. He hopes that Major Tim’s journey into space will excite the curiosity of children and draw them like a magnet towards space in particular and science in general.

The International Space Station orbits the Earth at about 17,000mph, roughly once every 90 minutes. So over a 24-hour period Tim Peake will see approximately 16 sunrises and sunsets.

“Experiences like that open up a spectrum of things for kids to get into. How do you sleep in space, how do you wash, what does the Earth look like from that distance?” he added. And if space-time and gravity seem like magic to youngsters, that’s all to the good.

“The Astronomer Royal of Scotland, John Brown, from the University of Glasgow, is a wonderful magician. He does card tricks,” Dr Baruch added. Science is stranger than fiction.

“We have found out that every new-born star has its own family of planets. As there are billions of stars in our galaxy alone, whatever odds you take, there are bound to be tens of thousands of planets like the Earth.

“It’s this that has led us to build telescopes like the optical one in Chile that has a 39m-wide mirror, nearly as big as this place,” he said, glancing round at the university of Bradford’s transparent-roofed atrium.

“Only a few weeks ago, I got a note from the director of the Hubble space telescope, Professor Matt Mountain, saying how pioneering Bradford University’s work was on the Robotic telescope.”

In the 20 years since making the Tenerife-based telescope available on the internet, hundreds of thousands of people from all over the UK and further afield, many of them students, have been using it.

There is another development in science that Dr Baruch hopes will catch on with youngsters, the biological ecology of what is immediately around us.

“Even in the space between your teeth and your gums there are 22 different species of cell. We are just starting to understand that. On your arm there are 160,000 species of different animals, plants, cells, all interacting with each other.

“Biologists are coming to to mathematicians and computer scientists for the math to do the calculations because the numbers are so big,” he said.

While much of this might leave you cold, the chances are that the younger generation, who take to computer technology so much more readily than their mums and dads, will be intrigued – given the opportunity.

“Science is about opening new doors into the world. The people who don’t walk through them get left behind. That’s why it’s really good that we had the British Science Festival here,” Dr Baruch added.

It’s more than making known to a bigger public the names of scientists with a Bradford connection, men like Nobel Prize-winning Sir Edward Appleton.

That kind of cultural tourism has its place. More importantly, the job is to excite the imagination of youngsters, to encourage them to have the confidence to take a walk through those new doors and understand the world about them perhaps for the first time.

Bradford’s Science Week is due to start on Wednesday, October 16.