SCALE MODEL NEWS

MAT IRVINE REPORTS Ask any film enthusiast, and probably many non-enthusiasts, to name the best science-fiction movie of all time, and you will probably get 9 out of 10 voting for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . For all those fans - and for space modellers too - comes the new book,  2001: The Lost Science by Adam K. Johnson. About the book Adam Johnson - also the driving force behind specialist model outfit AJA Models - has compiled and written the most detailed reference book on the movie so far, full title 2001: The Lost Science - the Frederick I. Ordway III Collection . With much material supplied by Dr Fred Ordway ( more on him below ), a great deal of the content has never been published before. Its 112 pages are full of detailed original plans (of which there were originally 2,400!), many of them painstakingly digitally enhanced, as the original blueprints have long-since faded. Examples of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ process are shown in the introduction. Other 2001...

Here's a bigger picture of the Moonbus, to show the crew seated in the flight deck, which you couldn't see before. It looks like a spacious place to be. As an aside, what a shame it is that the combined vision that 2001 Director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke had of the future development of spaceflight has never come to pass. If the US had just kept turning out those Saturn 5 rockets, then there would surely be a permanent Moonbase by now, and the Moon itself might even be the 51st state. As it is, Chinese or Indians are odds-on to be the next humans on the Moon - and good luck to them, if their governments have the cojones and vision t o get on with it.

Mat Irvine reports The Moonbus from 2001: A Space Odyssey was first issued as a kit by Aurora in 1968, along with Aurora’s take on the Orion spaceplane from the same movie. The Orion was reissued in 1975, but the Moonbus never reappeared and prices for the kit have tended to go through the roof on certain on-line auction sites. Retro-engineered Moonbus Moebius Models - one of those new model companies often dubbed the ‘New Aurora’ - has been contemplating the Moonbus for a couple of years, and now it is available online and in stores. The approximately 1:55 scale spacecraft is a retro-engineered kit - one that is copied from an existing original, with subtle changes made to improve assembly. Useful improvements Changes include the addition of locating pins and the like, which are hidden once assembled. But there have also been improvements to visible parts. The cockpit windows on the Aurora kit were single-layer transparencies, with an inner window canopy missing. Moebius have rectifi...