Ronpur's Custom Figure and Model thread!

The center vehicle is the VSS Enterprise, designed to carry the passenger from it's mothership to sub orbital altitude.

Side by side of the two ships:

Underside of the mothership, showing the rare earth magnet I added to hold the ship in place.

3 ships of the future: Orion, Spaceship Two and Dragon.

This is an amazing kit of an ISS/shuttle astronaut in his spacesuit (EMU).  

The very detailed and functional foot restraint.

PLSS and SAFER. SAFER is a "rocket belt" that can be used if an astronaut becomes unteathered and drift off structure.....just what Sandra Bullock needs,

And for night during a space walk, he has head lights!

Going into the past now, with Revell reissue of their 1/24th scale Gemini. I added exterior detail kit from Realspace models and after market decals. While there is an interior detail kit available, I didn't want to spend $60 on stuff that is mostly hidden. So I scratch built interior details.

Some really old models from Revell from the 1980's...before Challenger. The Space Operations Center, and early space station concept, a Laser Battle Station, meant to represent a space weapon from President Reagan's SDI and a Solar Power Satellite.

A space shuttle that never happened, the Kitty Hawk. It was one of the proposed names of the shuttle fleet.

The Kitty Hawk has several elements from various shuttle configurations. A new tile pattern around the windows, Challenger's tile pattern and Atlantis's thermal blankets.

13 months after finishing my Atlantis Tamiya model, I have built Challenger. This time, I used the Spacelab and parts from the STS-135 kit to show Spacelab D-1 on STS-62A. I used the Warbird decals for the tiles, but had to buy a second set to finish some of the white tile areas on the payload bay doors and tail. Many areas of tiles are missing from the 1/100th sheets. I will use the black tiles left over to redo the bottom of Atlantis.









I finished the model with a heavy heart when learning of Steve Nagel's death last week. He was always one of my favorite astronauts since he attended the University of Illinois, which is where I studied. It is my tribute to him and the others of that crew that have passed, as well as all of Challenger's crews.

I while ago, I re-read an alternate history book called "Voyage" by Stephen Baxter. His point of departure was Nov 22, 1963, and the Kennedy assassination. President Kennedy was paralyzed, Jackie dies. On July 20, 1969, Nixon invites Kennedy into the Oval Office to speak to the Apollo 11 astronauts on the Moon, and he challenges America to go on to Mars.

Baxter takes the 1970s Apollo spacecraft and Saturn rockets and rearranges them to make a Mars mission, Ares, that could have happened.

Having a tub full of old broken Saturn V models, I decided to do some building of his ships.

The earliest vehicle was the Apollo-N test vehicle that first flew the NERVA engine in Earth Orbit.



While this happened, the moon landings stopped at Apollo14, but a Skylab and a lunar version of Skylab, called "Moonlab" was flying. The Soviets got their N-1 rocket working and flew joint Soyuz-Moonlab missions, instead of Apollo-Soyuz.





I used Gimp to put the models into space!

The Ares mission was a orbital complex of Saturn stages, and to get them there, NASA came up with the Saturn VB, which had huge SRBs attached. They were the size of Shuttle SRBs.



Here it is on the launch pad.



And launch:

After 9 Saturn VB launches to assemble and fuel the boosters part of the vehicle, a Saturn VB launched the manned (and woman) segment of the mission, to dock in orbit.



On the left, the Apollo CSM, Skylab derived Mission Module and Mars Excursion Module in it's shroud dock the the M-SIVB and M-S-II stages and the external fuel tanks.

The launches took place from the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center. Here is the sign I created in the style of NASA in the 1980s:


KSC would have to had the third pad added to support the flight rate to build Ares:

Added in here: