For years I've been fascinated by this card depicting a Moon Prospector-like vehicle.
Its called the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory and is one of an American card set called Space Pak from 1962.
It's odd how the description on the back of the card just doesn't seem to fit the design of the vehicle. The pictured craft is clearly a wheeled rover but the card describes it as an orbiting satellite!
In reality NASA's Orbiting Geophysical Observatory or OGO, launched in 1964, looked like this:
History.nasa.gov
It's true that both the Prospector and OGO concepts were contemporaries as we can see in this magazine illustration from the Michigan Technic 1960. Both the Prospector star shaped base-plate and the OGO are pictured diagonally next to each other.
They are both described in the same paragraph [p.38. far left, bottom] in this 1962 publication, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
So did the Space-Pak Co. Inc of NYC simply get them mixed up?
If so, what is the model they used on their OGO card then?
Well it certainly looks like a Moon Prospector.
That's because it is one!
Here are some photographs I recently located on the online NASA Space Flight Forum and are posted here with permission from Forum member Blackstar, who sourced them from the NASA HQ History Archives [although I have been unable to find them there]:
And the second photograph showing the upturned Prospector appears to explain the need for that odd threaded bolt protruding from one of the tyres: to easily display it on its side!
Alas the maker of this model is unknown to me but I assume it was an engineer at NASA. Nevertheless, I can well imagine that this is the earliest model of what we came to know as the Moon Prospector when Century 21 delivered our own toy versions at Christmas 1967/68.
A final thought, pure speculation on my part, could it have been available to artist Jo Kotula when he painted the cover for Newsweek in June 1961? As far as I know this was the first artist's impression of a Prospector done in colour for the general public.
You can read the whole Newsweek article on their online archive here.
Does anyone know any more about the Space Pak model readers?
Well it certainly looks like a Moon Prospector.
That's because it is one!
Here are some photographs I recently located on the online NASA Space Flight Forum and are posted here with permission from Forum member Blackstar, who sourced them from the NASA HQ History Archives [although I have been unable to find them there]:
When we compare the Space Pak vehicle with these we can see that they are one in the same, Space Pak providing us with a colour picture.
Alas the maker of this model is unknown to me but I assume it was an engineer at NASA. Nevertheless, I can well imagine that this is the earliest model of what we came to know as the Moon Prospector when Century 21 delivered our own toy versions at Christmas 1967/68.
A final thought, pure speculation on my part, could it have been available to artist Jo Kotula when he painted the cover for Newsweek in June 1961? As far as I know this was the first artist's impression of a Prospector done in colour for the general public.
You can read the whole Newsweek article on their online archive here.
Does anyone know any more about the Space Pak model readers?
Those B/W pics of the model are a great find, Woodsy, congrats!
ReplyDeleteIf you can get a NASA publication or image number(s) for them, you might have an easier time finding them. (Though some NASA servers have been reorganised recently, which could account for its absence).
The ribbed bit on the wheel sort of looks like the end of a plastic bottle stop to me, which would then give an idea of that model's size.
Best -- Paul