SCALE MODEL NEWS

SMN spacenote: Mat irvine’s article on Dragon’s Mercury-Redstone reminded us that today is the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital spaceflight. Glenn became the fifth human in space, the third American in space, and the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth. Orbital mission John Glenn flew aboard the Mercury capsule Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962, on the Mercury-Atlas MA6 mission, during which he circled the Earth three times in a flight lasting 4 hours, 55 minutes, and 23 seconds. The pic above shows him climbing into the one-man spacecraft. Salute from Down Under Australians saluted Glenn during the flight, when the city of Perth became the ‘City of Light’, residents switching on all their house and street lights as the astronaut passed high overhead. It was a tribute that Perth repeated when Glenn flew in the Space Shuttle in 1998. On that mission he was aged 77, and still holds the record as oldest man in space. Good for you John Glenn, and NASA for making it possible. Dan...

Mat Irvine reports 19 December 1960 saw the very first launch of a Mercury capsule on a Redstone booster. This short flight (15 minutes 45 seconds) did not carry an astronaut though, for it was a ‘boiler-plate’ capsule (see previous posting on this subject), a test article built to check out systems, from basics like “does it fit on the top of the launch rocket?” to later technicalities, such as checking parachute deployment. For many years the best Mercury capsule you could get as a model kit was a 1:48 scale version that arrived in a box along with its bigger two-man sibling, Gemini. This was by Revell, and the kit has been around for many years, also cropping up twice under the Monogram name. But a few years ago, space modelling enthusiast Scott Alexander made the brave decision to design and finance a larger (and ‘larger’ here means ‘a lot larger’) model of this iconic capsule to 1:12 scale, making it four times the size of the Revell kit, so it packs a whole lot of detail. Scott r...