There are many beautiful toys in the SpaceX 2 range and the Astronomic Telescopic Satellite or ATS is one such toy. It is a rare beauty as well. In all my years of collecting toys I've never seen either a complete loose example and certainly not a fully carded one, only the artwork on the back of other SpaceX 2 cards like the one below.
The closest I've come to the toy are the two photographs of ATS's above [ photoshopped together by me] : the top toy is a custom hybrid of original and repro parts by our very own Bill and is the nearest we have as to what a complete toy looks like. The middle picture is an original ATS body minus the solar panels from the Barry Forde collection.
The small picture is the artwork of the ATS as featured on the rear of the SpaceX 2 MOLAB backing card below courtesy of Will Osborne. As always, your pictures, thoughts and stories welcomed.
I was going to do a dedicated follow up to this article, like woodsys other spacex 2 pieces, but he's pinched my photo and anyway, it would be another rant.
ReplyDeleteThe ATS has, for me, to be the nadir of the whole collection. Apart from basically being a kids telescope like you would find in a lucky bag five years earlier, it was the flimsiest model yet. The solar panels were so thin, just attaching them to the model meant they snapped, almost immediately and the addition of the two cosmic dustbins at the rear, hardly made it an exciting piece. As I had been familiar with the NASA design from a Look and Learn spread a few years earlier, finding this amongst the unusual and exciting futuristic designs was a real disappointment. I recall seeing one in Speke market, round 1975 for 12p and contemptuously left it sitting there! Aaargh, the folly of youth.
They're both certainly unusual. If I were starting a Spacex collection they wouldn't be my first choices. Having said that I still think they're interesting.
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