Towards A Red Planet

I love soviet era hardware, the massive rockets, ungainly spacesuits and downright ugly space probes. The russian aesthetic is much more practical and industrial, rather than the western approach to space design, there's no attempt at delicacy, its all about doing the job. With this in mind, I got the idea to knock up a quick model of a soviet-style probe, with no clear design in mind, just using bits from the scrap box.

The front is a lid from shampoo or something and always put me in mind of the Russian 'Venera' Venus Probe, so I took that and worked backwards from there.

A pair of solar panels from a speaker grille, the lid off a pill box and a handful of kit parts and voila! Rather than send it off to Venus, I felt Mars might be a suitable destination, as its currently in the news again with three separate probes headed towards it in the next few weeks.

The Mars Probe is significantly larger than my earlier space probe scratchbuilds, the Ranger 5 Moon Probe and the circumlunar Sputnik 7, which I knocked out a few months back. I think I might have to make the Mars Lander now, to go with it! Watch this space!