SCALE MODEL NEWS

SKYLON UPDATE: The UK Government is investing £60m GBP ($92m USD) on the Skylon's revolutionary Sabre engine, to enable a full-scale prototype to be built - so maybe this special edition model isn't pie-in-the-sky.  That political vote of confidence means that the designers now hope to see Sabre engines powering the Skylon spaceplane on operational flights by 2022, each ship carrying a 15-tonne payload into orbit. First test flights for the uncrewed vehicle are tentatively scheduled three years earlier, in 2019. As a passenger-carrying machine, a skip-glide flight across the top of the atmosphere could enable a London-Sydney journey in as little as four hours. The British-designed Skylon is the brainchild of engineer Alan Bond, reports Mat Irvine. Bond heads his own space business, Reaction Engines, and now i t may not be too many years before the single-stage-to-orbit aerospaceplane soars into orbit. Until then we can dream on with this Herpa 1:250 scale model kit. Alan Bond (...

MAT IRVINE REPORTS: This is the latest in the hugely popular Haynes car repair manual series, featuring the two-seater Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) that was driven on the Moon by astronauts of Apollo missions 15-17. It should come in useful as a valuable reference source for real-space model fans. The book style is not quite the same as Haynes car owner’s manuals, as it doesn’t explain how to dismantle and repair an LRV. Instead, it tells the story of the vehicle, the trials and tribulations involved in its design, and the difficulties involved in creating a lightweight electric machine capable of working in an airless environment, and that had to fold up for transportation to the Moon’s surface on the side of a two-man Lunar Module (LM). Large-scale models As for models of the Lunar Rover, this is a very mixed bag. There has never been a definitive large-scale LRV model in conventional injection styrene, though in 1971, AMT announced a planned 1:25 scale kit via a promotion sheet (b...