NATIONAL SPACE CENTRE UK

This is the UK's National Space Centre in Leicestershire. I've never been but it looks so impressive, especailly the 'Rocket Tower' housing a real rocket. I really ought to go. Anyone been?

What do Space Centres look like in other countries?

SUPER NOVA

You just can't keep a good NOVA down [a la Spacex] and here's another one on an old badge for CARREFOUR, a large French retailer [thanks Paul!]. You can see that the badge illustration is basically a straight lift of the oft-copied Ed Valigursky painting done in the early 1960's. Any more NOVA's out there?

[Badge: Ebay]

 

Some more cool space badges online. Remember these?

And I'm soooo excited to see THESE BADGES on flickr again

- JELLY TERROR, LOLLY GOBBLE CHOC BOMB and HAUNTED HOUSE LOLLIES!

BY THE SWORD UNITED

After the excitement of watching the Sears 3-Stage Rocket reach the heady heights of over £300 last week on Ebay [one of our readers?], its been a good month if your'e biulding up your SWORD collection. Currently in Canada, Italy, US and the UK you will find up for auction:

• Apollo Saturn Rocket
• Scramble Bug
• Task Force 1,2 and 3
• Probe Force 3
• Booster Rocket [Rare Italian Hover version, which first surfaced last year]
• Space Glider
• Moon Bus [Tarheel]
• Moon Prospector [Tarheel] Ended [a reader perhaps?]

ON THE CARDS: SATELLITE PATROL AND THUNDERBALL

I do love cheapo plastic carded sets and here's two corkers recently on Ebay. The SATELLITE PATROL is a variation on the Space Exploration sets we've seen before, the main difference being the name and the header image. The second set is clearly inspired by Thunderball and the famous underwater battle scene. The black and red craft looks so familiar but I just can't put my finger on it* PS. See below!

 

As per Spectrum Steve's comment, here's a pic he's sent of said GI Joe Sled! Cool!

Childhoods End

So good im blogging it twice - actually its a consequence of scanning the book as I cracked the spine and the pages loosened, so I thought id illustrate the kind of entry that Barlowes Guide to E.T's consists of. This is the Overlord, the dominant alien species from Clarkes 'Childhoods End', and an extremely demonic looking creature which so impressed me back in '79 that I went out and found a copy of the book to read. A lot of the illustrations in the volume compelled me to look into the stories behind them such as the cool alien arthropods from Hal Clements 'Mission of Gravity', the Mesklinites; which lived on an oblate world suffering extremes of gravity at various points on its surface or the truly alien, energy devouring Ixtl from Van Vogts 'Voyage of the Space Beagle'. Some of my explorations led to really great reads but in other ways, such as my expectations of seeing the 'Master' from the 'City of Gold and Lead' in the BBC tv series, 'The Tripods' - were a definite disappointment.

Loving the Alien

One of the most difficult things when reading sci-fi is a question of visualisation. Depending on how good the story teller is and how colourful your imagination is, the experience can vary tremendously.Sometimes if I read a book it springs cinematically into my head, full formed and I can 'see' the settings, characters and ships in my head. Other times, its hard to visualise or imagine the more alien concepts. At such times, a little help is always welcome - something I found invaluable was 'Barlowes Guide to Extraterrestrials'. Published in 1979 by Wayne Douglas Barlowe and Ian Summers, it documents a selection of great science fiction aliens with a full page illustration and a description and biological workup of each one and the story in which it appears.

Its a beautiful and enthralling book - probably long out of print, but well worth looking for!
Ive scanned the 'index' sheets and comparative size chart which shows all of the entries as a big file, see how many you recognise!

Especially for Woodsy - No10 is the Overlord from 'Childhoods End'!

MODEL AUTO REVIEW 242

There is a short article on our friend the MOON PROSPECTOR in the small-sized UK magazine MODEL AUTO REVIEW (MAR) Issue 242 (May 2010). A Woodsy/Wotan creative effort, it's short and sweet and updates a much older Prospector article in the magazine. The issue's contents list can be seen here and back issues can be found here. I won't be posting the article on the blog as MAR [Rod Ward, Editor] is a small magazine and if interested, ought to be bought.

Space Fleet 2000

A long time ago, in a sweetshop far away... Swizzels Matlow rolled out a series of candy containers shaped like spaceships. Each one was filled with sherbet and was made of coloured injection moulded plastic.

Unscrewing the lid and eating the candy inside, left the plastic shell ready for a quick wash and then the containers could be joined together to make various shaped spaceships, or by using the three different spaceport sections, a large and expandable space station. The ships were sold in a counter box and at 10p each it was easy to cherry pick the ones you wanted to complete your collection.

Way back in the mid eighties, I made regular pilgrimages to newsagents and sweetshops to find as many of the little spaceport sections as I could.

The candy was horrendous and made my teeth ache just by looking at it and as I had previously made myself ill by consuming boxes of KP Outer Spacer crisps in order to get the Alien Space Fleet, I usually just emptied out the sugary contents and went straight on to building the station.

There was also a Spacefleet 2000 poster showing all the ships in the line - but i cant recall where this came from, possibly it was a mailaway.

Sometime later, I happened across a similar candy premium called Astro Fizz in the shape of a space glider type ship. This one was hastily filed in the vaults and still has the sherbet inside! Yuk..



POSTSCRIPT BY WOODSY 2015:

USA Version by Ca De Candy 1982 CD 2000 Space Fleet - small pics from an old Ebay listing [see my comment below - Woodsy - in the comments for the listing description]