SCALE MODEL NEWS

THERE ARE PLENTY OF APOLLO KITS out there, not so many models of the Viking that landed on Mars, seven years after the first Apollo landing. Mat Irvine:  Monogram, Airfix and AMT all issued Saturn V rockets to celebrate Project Apollo, with an appropriately scaled Lunar Module (LM) on board. Airfix made the first separate kit of the Lunar Module, to 1:72 scale, and it is still a very good representation. Monogram produced a larger 1:48 scale LM, with all the paraphernalia carried by the Apollo 11 Mission, to be laid out on a textured base. The Revell 1:48 scale Apollo craft ( below from left: LM, CM and SM ). I built the trio as a retro-style display model as you might have seen on the desk of a NASA executive. Airfix 1:72 scale LM ( below ) with the astronauts and equipment supplied with the kit. The only item not relevant to Apollo 11 is the high-gain dish antenna, which wasn’t carried until Apollo 12. Apollo has also been a favourite with so-called ‘garage’ companies. Vista Repl...

  An appreciation by Mat Irvine Sir Patrick Moore, creator and presenter of ‘The Sky at Night’, a long-running BBC TV astronomy show, died yesterday, December 9, aged 89. Although Sir Patrick Moore's name is perhaps not automatically associated with scale models, in fact it was through modelling that I first met Patrick Moore more than 40 years ago, when I supplied some spacecraft miniatures to The Sky at Night, a connection that continued on and off until the present day. I don’t think anyone would deny that Patrick was the world’s most famous amateur astronomer, for he was a professional broadcaster, but an amateur astronomer in the true sense of the term. Through The Sky at Night, he inspired countless people, many of whom went on to become professional astronomers, space scientists, or were given a lifetime interest in the subject. It would be difficult to put a figure on these numbers, though I know I was one of them. Patrick in The Sky at Night studio ( above ) around the lat...