Space Snaps

The nights are drawing in and I found I had a bit of time on my hands, so I decided to try and recreate one of my favourite spaceships of childhood, the Nuclear Mars Mission Craft. It first appeared on the cover of the Brooke Bond Race into Space Tea card album, but also popped up on the pull out poster from Countdown comic - ‘Space -Forward to 1988’.

Clearly, these were futures that never arrived, much to my dismay, but the design lives on. My ambition is to make a large scale model of the Mars rocket, but as usual, the best laid plans went out the window and the sections of waste pipe I had put aside for the job, stayed in the back of the garage till another day. So I scaled back my plans and bought a packet of bubble bath tubes instead, each about 4” long. Around the same time I won some Matt Mason spare parts on eBay, along with a few other space toys, which included a plastic LEM and part of a Saturn rocket - both from one of the cheap space sets often sold in supermarkets. The Saturn rocket was in two parts and was made of a soft plastic. Having joined the three bubble bath tubes together as the main body, I needed the elongated ‘neck’ section, so I reversed the front half of the Saturn and fitted it back into the booster section, and the resulting tubular arrangement fitted nicely onto the body. A few bottle tops, some tap accessories, a handful of beads and some Lego finished off the model. Rather than fiddle about trying to neatly paint everything, I printed out a ‘wrap’ with decals and details of panel lines on and fixed this to the outside of the tubes. A bit of copper tape for colour and some final detailing finished it off. Not nearly as ambitious as the model I want to make, but enough for a distraction over a couple of evenings.

The plastic LEM is quite a nice, simple toy in the vein of the late sixties Apollo Moon Exploring, only larger. I added a couple of Lego flats as windows to relieve the stark whiteness of the body and made a base and engine nozzle to sit on the hollow underside and it makes a nice, differently shaped LEM, not unlike the very early proposals for the lander.