it looks great

and it sees the light of day!

Woo hoo! That is several kinds of cool!

Nice.

Very nice model.

5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1.. Zero! . . . Ignition!

Truly splendid, a very successful reminder of the grand old days when we thought anything was possible--and perhaps it was!

Von Braun / Colliers?

You bet.

Ah, what a beautiful thing it is.

"This is the captain speaking. Due to that meteor shower we've had a bit of a navigational problem and had to set down in a Venusian jungle."

Captain, to Engineer: "We have to leave right away, before the atmosphere crushes us!"
Engineer: "Sure, Captain. No pressure."
Captain: (face-palm)

;)

Very pretty, congrats! Do you know the specs of the engines? Like the thrust or ISP that they have?

The ref I'm working off of didn't have any numbers, but I'm WAGing something in the 100 ton class, maybe less(?) as they are nitric acid/hydrazine and only pressure fed (the little spheres are helium tanks). That is one of the more interesting things about the thing, it was drawn up with only off-the-shelf technology with minimal "invent a miracle here", so would have been well within the purely technical limits of the time. But it would have been crazy expensive, with dozens of heavy lifts to orbit to amass the materials for an in-orbit build.

That's always been the problem. We can do space colonies and such from a technical standpoint, but the cost is outrageous.

At least in terms of taking the trough away from politicians...

Fantastic Steve. I'd bet Mr. Chester Bonestell and Werner Von Braun would be delighted, and impressed.

For a long while it was thought the 'slow and steady' method would be the way to the moon. Step #1- Develop a reliable, reusable SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) rocket. Step #2- Use rocket to assemble permanent space station into orbit. Step 3#- Assemble moon rocket in orbit ans amass needed supplies. Step #4- Launch rocket to moon. Step #5- Detach beginning modules for permanent moon base and return to earth. Step #6- Return moon rocket to station orbit for refurbishment and return trip to moon with additional modules and crew for moon base.

Then Kennedy launched the moon race and utterly tossed the plan out the window...

That's incredible!

If you put a very lightweight skin on this, it would easily be one of the many tailstanding rockets so common in early fiction...

Solid! All it needs is a Chesley Bonestell backdrop.

Interesting.one would think there would be a skin around the frame.

not needed in a vacuum. silver paint and possibly a slow rotation would be anough

Actually, those weird little round things on the round tanks are thermal control do-hickies (not fully explained)

Nice design, but utterly vulnerable to micrometeorite strikes...

Everything was suppose to be a multiple layered flexible material with a thin metal skin that was suppose to be resistant.

And aside from the command capsule, none of the Saturn/Apollo stack had anything like armor on it.

True enow.

Impressive piece iof work, steve. go take a bow.

Where is this going? Also, you should put your contact information card for reference purposes.

Private purchase, as far as I know. Same collection as the two A-4 rockets and the "retriever rocket" (Lunar reconnaissance probe).

Perhaps it's a case of what Carl Jung called synchronicity. Last night, I watched the episode of American Genius on National Geographic Channel that pitted Wernher von Braun against Sergei Korolev in the Space Race. Unfortunately, the next episode was the Samuel Colt / Daniel B. Wesson one, which is so full of factual holes it's historical Swiss cheese. I hope they were a little more careful with the Space Raced show.

Who knew that the surface of the moon would look so much like... I dunno, stale cement mix? I got 80 pounds in the basement, wanna fake an Apollo landing?

Airstream...space style.

Though shouldn't there be some blast marks on the surface, from the rockets?

maybe, more like simple dust shuffling(large number of low thrust motors, likely throttled back and not too close to the surface), made life simpler by not bothering

Command, we confirm successful touch-down. Repeat- successful touch-down!
Very cool to see it done!
How many hours do you think?

Not a ton, certainly much fewer than the A-4 s. No real research, no scale drawings to make, only a very few parts to pattern, but no real idea as to the actual manhours. That it was done over a couple months was more to do with all kinds of life stuff intervening, including a fierce bit of Spring allergies that was a new and unpleasant experiance. Some of teh individual steps were not so bad, the forming and cutting and soldering of the basic frame (once I got the hang of gun soldering- not much experiance - only torch soldering of copper plumbing before) only took a few hours over a few days to do.

Okay, cool! I know those allergy feels, seems I've developed a new allergy or my body is simply freaking out over high pollen levels because pollen is like a very fine dust! Either way, quite annoying... *sniffle* (dang! I forgot to hit reply! XD)

Pure 1950's. Beautiful.

You should try doing a Soviet Lunar Probe next like Luna (OOPS!) 23. ;)

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/uploa.....a23_figure.png

There was a display of Soviet/Russian space hardware in Seattle some years back, including lunar missions. Pretty cool. But these builds are customer requests.

I have to say, this is incredible. Was this a kit that you found, or (as said above) a private purchase? This reminds me of the old SF covers of the 50s or so, and I'm also a scale-model builder too. Hence why I'm quite interested in a purchase of a kit if available.

No, it is scratch build by me for a private customer. Check out previous posts that include work in progress.

Oh pity. Scratch building is something I never was into but that was an incredible piece of work.

Nice work, Steve!

It's almost too bad NASA never got to build the real thing. I realize the final Apollo/etc. designs were superior both technically and functionally, but the Ley/von Braun/Bonestell concepts had a 1950's retro charm we never really got to see in action. :)

Beautiful sci-fi stuff, and interesting comments! Guess I will have some material here to read :) And seems like a lot of it is even on the borderline of not being merely "fiction". Nicely done, it looks absolutely plausible, something I could imagine landing on the moon in its era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

I built an N1 rocket in 1/144 some years earlier.