One of Willard Wigan's amazing micro-sculptures
Willard Wigan makes sculptures inside of the eyes of needles, or on the heads of pins. He apparently does this by hand but with the aid of a microscope. I can’t imagine how he does it. Apparently he was identified with a learning disability when he was young and he set out to prove them wrong…amazing!
The novel I wrote two years ago that takes place in the alternate universe of the Domination of the Draka will be available on the interweebs soon. It’s sort of an alternate-universe take on the early days of the US experimental jet and space vehicles that flew out of Edwards Air Force Base in the 1950s and 1960s – sort of an alternate “The Right Stuff.”
It needs a cover, like all novels. About a year ago I acquired a resin limited-run model kit from Fantastic Plastic that was a speculative look at what might have been if the X-15 rocket plane program had continued into the late 1960s. The kit of the X-15-D was mastered by Scott Lowther, editor/publisher and primary author of the Aerospace Projects Review and one of the authorities on concept aircraft and spacecraft. It was cast by BLAP Models and included decals by JBOT, both legends in the garage-kit space model kit business.
The kit was beautifully done, both in design and in execution. It was pretty a pretty simple build, especially because I didn’t want to include landing gear. Instead, I filled in the landing gear wells before painting.
I had in mind that the “real” concept spaceplane of 1967, the X-15-D, could become my X-14 Demon of 1953 in my book. The Demon was described as a single-seat suborbital spaceplane, sort of a super-X-15 with a scramjet chamber as well as rocket engines. The look of the X-15-D fit the description pretty well, even though I had originally envisioned the Demon about six or seven years ago without knowing about the design for an X-15 follow-on. (This is not that surprising. In The Stone Dogs, the third Draka novel, author S.M. Stirling sets forth a timeline of technological development and history that has the US and the Draka both getting men into orbit in the late 1950s – but using spaceplanes, not disintegrating totem poles.)
I had to make a couple of changes. First, the X-15 was covered in Iconel-X, a very temperature-resistant nickel-based alloy, and it was usually painted black. (On one flight it was coated in a heat-shedding ablative coating that was bright pink; the pilots refused to fly a pink airplane so white paint was applied over the coating before flight.) The Demon’s skin was made of a cermet, a ceramic-metallic composite material that had a rather unusual origin – you’ll have to read the book! Anyway, the cermet wouldn’t look purely metallic, or purely flat black, so I painted it black and dusted it with silver and blue shades to give it a hint of a different color.
I left off the NASA markings and a few of the others that I felt were out of scale with what I imagined the plane to be. (There is no NASA in the Drakaverse.) Otherwise, it’s Lowther’s airplane – I made no changes in the design. I ended up with this:
I hope I did Scott and the folks justice in building this model. It’s a cool design. I can’t just put the plane on the cover like this, though – I wanted to make it look realistic, as if it was in flight. I have very little of a real artistic hand, but I started fooling with a few tools and came up with a few possibilities. These are probably not what will eventually make the cover, but they are a start as I learn the software. I used a masking plug-in for Photoshop called Topaz ReMask to clip the plane out of the image, then composited with various images taken from high-altitude aircraft and balloons. Then I used a nifty little tool called Neatberry PhotoStyler to create some “vintage” photos of the plane in flight.
Over California
At apogee
Black and white is stylish, right?
Over a certain place in Nevada that doesn't exist
I don’t quite have it to the point where the model doesn’t look like a model, yet. A couple of these backgrounds were shot from orbital altitude, and the Demon wasn’t supposed to be able to go into orbit…that wouldn’t be for a few years yet. I’m working on it, and it’s been great fun. I highly recommend these tools, along with Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, as software even an untrained person like me can use.
You can say you saw the Demon first!
(And by the way, the Demon was flown in the book by Jack Ridley, a test pilot and engineer who was a real person and a great pilot. He’s the guy who gave Chuck Yeager the stick of Beeman’s gum (and the broom handle) before Yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1 in real life! Check out Yeager’s autobiography for more information.)
Falcon 9 flying model (with detachable clear fins needed for flying)
Back in the heyday of the Space Race in the 1960s, the major model kit manufacturers sold kits of the real space vehicles for Baby Boomer space fans. It was also the high-growth period for flying model rockets, with Estes Industries leading the industry, but with several other manufacturers developing interesting kits as well.
The major model kit manufacturers from around the world have produced kits of American and Russian space vehicles ever since. This piece isn’t about that, but about how SpaceX is trying to rekindle that kind of excitement with this generation by selling a flying model rocket kit of their flagship launcher/cargo capsule combo, the Falcon 9/Dragon vehicle. They were smart in marketing it on Amazon, and the box proudly proclaims, “Made in the USA.” The real SpaceX vehicle is all-US designed and built from the ground up. (Just as a comparison, the Japanese H-1 launcher used a licensed version of the US-designed Delta, and the US Atlas 5 uses the Russian-built RD-180 engine.)
SpaceX is combining its second and third orbital test flights of the Falcon 9/Dragon into one mission, scheduled to launch on February 7 of this year. If successful, the Dragon will rendezvous with the ISS and will be captured with the robotic arm, then docked with the ISS.
CGI image of the Dragon berthed at the ISS
If this flight is successful, commercial flights to the ISS could begin during 2012. The man-rated version of the Dragon is scheduled to be ready for flight in 2015.
I hope selling a flying model of the Falcon will help bring more interest in SpaceX in particular and commercial space in general. It’s not as “interesting looking” as the Mercury/Atlas or Saturn V models of yesteryear, but it’s real, and it’s flying. I hope a commercial model company will offer a plastic static-display kit of the Dragon…but unfortunately it will probably be made by a foreign company if at all. Revell/Monogram is the last of the big model companies in the US. (Although I wouldn’t discount Moebius Models or Polar Lights/Round 2 – both are smaller companies that have been very aggressive in science fiction subjects.
Boxtop art for the Revell Mercury-Atlas - it came with a full launcher as well!
The art from the 1960s Revell 1/96 Apollo/Saturn V kit - the completed model is over 3 feet tall!
By the way, the image above is from this site – check the price – $ 420!
Want to fly a 1/100 scale Apollo Saturn? Get the one below from this site.
Estes is still in the business of flying rockets and is the major manufacturer of model rocket engines.
I just received a copy of the Falcon/Dragon model. One of these days I’ll build it and post some pictures here! UPDATE 1-20-2012: I’ve received the kit and the quality of the kit and instructions is outstanding. The lower section of the body and the Dragon capsule are ABS plastic, and the clear fins are polycarbonate, so they should handle plenty of rough landings. The body tube is completely enclosed in a pre-printed self-adhesive paper wrap, which means there is no painting needed and it should strengthen the body tube besides. There is a wrap for the Dragon capsule as well. The instructions are great – someone 12-14 years old with no previous experience building a model rocket should have no problem with this, and assembly should only take a few hours. I’ll add some photos soon. I highly recommend this!
SpaceX flying model (1:288 scale) of the Falcon 9/Dragon
It would be interesting to know how many of the folks who work at SpaceX flew model rockets when they were kids. I did, but that was in the heyday of model rocketry, in the 1960s and early 1970s. My son did, with me, when he was in elementary and middle school.
However it worked back then, the folks at SpaceX have a 1:288 flying model of the Falcon 9/Dragon that will be available soon from Amazon. (The image above is of the prototype; the production model will have clear plastic fins that are removable for display. This is a brilliant move, if not in marketing, certainly for inspiration of America’s youth. They also understand the short attention span of kids today. No painting is required on the model and it looks like assembly should be quick. This is the time of short assembly flying models, and they understood that. (Today you can buy a remote-controlled airplane or helicopter for under $ 30 that is almost ready to fly right out of the box. Thanks to our Chinese overlords for that bit of manufacturing savvy.)
In February, should everything go well, there should be a flurry of news reports about the first commercial spacecraft to dock at the ISS. That will generate a lot of free publicity for SpaceX. The time is right for kids to be reminded that going into space isn’t just something from an old history book, or from an EFX-laden movie. Real people are building real hardware to go into space. Even Newt gets it – more on that in a later post!
Of course, if the Dragon flight to the ISS is a dismal failure, things could be different. I admire the courage and confidence of Elon Musk and the SpaceX team to roll two test flights into one and go for it. That’s something that NASA almost always did not do, even in the Gemini and Apollo days.
The real deal, getting ready for launch in February
So I applaud SpaceX for promoting space exploration with the flying model. I’ve not flown one in a decade, though I still have all mine and a stock of Estes rocket motors, which may or may not be good anymore. I may have to drag them out and see if I can still get one stuck in a tree as reliably as I used to do!
X-wing repaint for the Navy
An artist going by the name of Clave has done twelve pages – over a hundred individual images – of beautiful profiles of aircraft and spacecraft, repainted in livery that they would never historically have, like an F-22 of the Soviet Air Force, etc. The majority are aircraft, mainly WWI and current jet aircraft, but some are TV/film spacecraft like the Gerry Anderson Thunderbirds ships and the Battlestar Galactica Viper. I hope he doesn’t mind me posting this one example. Go to these pages to find the others. Even if you are not a fan of aircraft, science fiction, or alternate history, you will enjoy the sheer artistry in his work. He is an incredible craftsman. Rarely have I seen so much beautiful, exacting imagery of such high quality and with such interesting ideas!
If I saw it on the intertubes, it must be true...
Here it is, folks…Japanese model manufacturing company Tamiya is apparently creating a Moon Landing Conspiracy plastic model kit, as you can see above. (The image is larger; click to expand it. The detail is important!) Yes, in the lower right corner are two Nixon versions: happy Dick and sad Dick. I particularly like the steering wheel for the lunar rover.
That should be the tip-off. According to the web site The Inspiration Room, this image and the ones below were created by Tamiya’s ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather Vietnam, for a series of print ads the company is going to put out. Some of the others are in just plain poor taste. Here’s the Elvis set:
And the Roswell set:
(Note the pig on the bottom of the sprue above. Ick.)
Now it gets weird. Here’s the Marilyn Monroe set:
And the most tasteless of all, but one that couldn’t be missed, of course: the JFK set:
The pity is, I don’t know whether to deplore this or wish I had a set or two of each…
Vincent Meens' completed ascent stage
In 2006 modelmaker Vincent Meens found a series of images online created by John Ottman. They were a digital re-creation of the lunar module in exquisite detail. Vincent was so impressed he decided to build a similarly detailed version in “real life.” And, four and a half years later, he did…one of the finest models of any kind I’ve ever seen. The detail has to be seen to be believed. His web site is here.
interior detail
This model is in 1/24 scale, and entirely scratchbuilt. On the web site Vincent documents the build, step by step, and that is a marvel in itself. At the end, he created a PowerPoint file that compares Ottman’s digital views with those of his physical model. Again, you will have to see the images to believe them.(Ottman died in 2009, unfortunately, and did not get to see the results of Vincent’s final work.)
This is craftsmanship at its very best. I am in awe of this man’s work. Even if you are not a fan of modelmaking or real space subjects, you should take a look at his site just to see what a person can accomplish with great dedication to his craft. This model is truly an achievement of which Vincent should be very proud!
A modeler named Pete Malaguti took 900 hours to complete this 1/72 scale cutaway of the space shuttle. There are lots of other photos, and a step-by-step of his build, here.
Absolutely stunning work!
Orion on landing
If you fondly remember 1960s and 70s science fiction shows, or you just love great modelmaking, you need to see the Sci-Fi Airshow site. Bill George, a Visual Effects Supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, did a truly beautiful job on these images.
Spindrift from "Land of the Giants"
The artwork includes several larger versions for computer wallpaper. Really, you should see this artist’s work. Go check it out!
Three years of work…this thing is impressive! See more of it here. There is a certain level of obsession, maybe, but a good one, I think!
