By its nature, humanity is a species that is not content. While we try to convince ourselves that the grass is really not greener on the other side of the fence, the simple truth is that we aren’t wired to believe it. Unless we’re doing something, making some progress or exploring some dangerous, new frontier, we, as a race, just don’t seem to be able to focus our energy.
It has always been that way. From the time that early hominids started roaming about upright, seeing what was on the next horizon, we have always wanted to know where we can go next. It hasn’t changed, and as our technology has advanced, we seem to be able to go more places, and do more things. Drilling into the earth, diving deep under the oceans and flying through the sky were all once the exclusive real of science fiction. Now, though, all those things are routine, daily occurrences. Yet, despite conquering all that, humanity still wanted more.
Humanity wanted the heavens. Once the realm of gods and totally unapproachable we mere mortals, space is, as Captain Kirk would best say it, “the final frontier”. By the end of WWII, though, advances in rocket technology made it seem as though even this dream could be satisfied. Scarcely more than a decade later, we were throwing the first feebly beeping spheroids into the vastness around our planet, and not long later, humans left their world with surprising regularity.
But, was that good enough? Is it EVER good enough? No. Of course not. Having made it to space, humanity wanted to walk on another world. Since the moon was closest, that seemed like a pretty good place to start. Thus, the race for the moon kicked of what must surely be one of the most hectic and impressive periods of peaceful technological development in our history. If you were alive at the time, the fever surrounding the Space Race was very real, and the public interest in space exploration has never been, and may well never again be, higher.
The US Apollo program aimed to develop the rockets, spacecraft and lunar landers to put men on the moon for the first time. A supremely advanced and ambitious undertaking, the Apollo system included a Command/Service Module (CSM) and a Lunar Excursion Module (LEM). The CSM was the truck; it got the LEM to the moon, carrying the astronauts to that body and then bringing them home, while the LEM took a pair down to the moon’s alien surface and got them back to the CSM. At the time, it was the most advanced spacecraft ever devised by human science. At the time of writing, you could still make the case that it as remained that way, since no craft since has been able to duplicate that feat.
While I wasn’t alive during those heady days, I did still find space, our solar system and the history of space flight to be very exciting as a child. I had lots of books on planets, rockets and the like, and went to numerous space museums (including those in Jackson, MI and Wapakoneta, OH) on family trips. Despite my increasing interest in modelling in those days, I never had any models of the Apollo craft, LEM or even a Saturn V. While I found them interesting to see and read about, they didn’t excite me as things to build. I liked planes, and then robots, and then cars, and then subs, and then tanks and… you get it. Still, I never thought much of building something from Apollo.
I can’t say why. They just didn’t interest me, and the need to do a lot of complex gold foiling and ceramic tiling just didn’t turn my modelling-crank. Now, thankfully, since then, Lego has released beautiful sets of both the LEM and the Saturn V, both of which I have, and both of which look fantastic. However, Lego’s great, but it’s still not a model kit…
A Tiny Opportunity:
However, things changed when I managed to get a hold of the Academy History of Transportation gift set. In that strange, Whitman Sampler-like collection of micro kits (pirated from other moulds from the ‘60s and ‘70s) were both an Apollo CSM and an LEM. Still, though, these are, by and large, very simple kits, and I’d have to be stuck for something to model to try them.
And, so I came to be stuck. Due to various family circumstances, including the worsening health and death of my father (RIP, Chief…) at the start of the year, the truck I’d been working on hasn’t made much progress. I haven’t had much time to get to work on anything, and I’ll admit that, while I am still buying models, I really do miss the building of them. I needed something simple that would at least allow me to finish something. I needed something that had a very few pieces, and would still be inspirational. I needed… the Apollo CSM from that weird Academy gift set!
Constructive Interference:
As I mentioned, the Apollo program and its hardware have always been inspirational and interesting to me in real life. I thought it was time to at least have a replica of this very important and pioneering craft on my shelves. However, the Academy kit is so simple and small that, alone, it wouldn’t make a very interesting display. It would look like a museum piece, nothing more. (Yes, I KNOW that’s how I always like to make my kits look, but I’m a contrary cuss, so you’ll just have to go with me on this one!)
I wanted to see this little guy soaring in space, breaking the new ground his real-life counterpart did all those many years ago when my dad filmed the TV broadcasts of the original Apollo 11 using his family’s Super8 camera. That’s when I had a dim recollection of a handful of bases given to me by a fellow modeller years ago. He had them for some project or other that he either finished without the bases, or changed completely. I took them because you never know what you might need.
Among them was an old base that was the surface of the moon, and another one that was a curved section of the moon! This dome-like section would be perfect! I have no idea where it’s from; if anyone does, leave me a comment. This base is clearly old, and yellowed. It was used as a display base for something before; I could see a broken support peg in one of the craters. Still, with a bit of work and some paint, this base could provide the context I needed for my little CSM, and with this idea I set off on my own mission to conquer the moon!
Very, VERY Humble Beginnings:
The Academy CSM kit is simple in the very extreme. It has four parts. Two halves, a “door” that opens and the three “astronauts” that fit inside the “cockpit”. Yeah, there are a lot of “quotes” there for a reason. The “door” is an opening strip on the nose of the Apollo, but it doesn’t represent a real door, like on the real capsule. The “astronauts” are three humaniform blobs sitting on a block of what could well be concrete as far as I can tell, and “cockpit” is just a hole where said blobs sit.
The Exhaust nozzle is hollow; you can see into the craft from behind, and clearly that needed to be fixed. Oh, the nose is also a big open hole! The docking equipment for the LEM was way more than I was expecting, but apparently, blanking off the nose was also not something the original moulders had bothered to consider. Sigh…
I decided it would be best just to glue the “door” in place and put in a bit of solid material for the “windows”. A small circle of sheet styrene was cut and glued to one half of the hull, and the door was glued on. The fit was, as expected, rather poor, so I applied a bit of “sprue goo” (i.e., glue-melted styrene) to the inside. I figured this would help hold the door shut as well as seal the gap.
What I did NOT count on was that this plastic, despite its brittleness, would so readily melt in the presence of Plast-i-Weld cement. As the sprue goo dried, the “door” warped, then the entire NOSE warped. By the time all was done, the nose was a caved-in mess, more reminiscent of a single-vehicle rollover than the pioneering spacecraft it was purporting to be! “What a NOOB-level mistake!” I thought as I mulled over my next step. At this point, it seemed like I’d just wasted a small, but rather useless-anyway kit. May as well just wipe its sad little melted-arse into the rubbish bin…
But I couldn’t. It wasn’t the CSM’s fault it was crappy, and it wasn’t its fault I’d melted it. It deserved more. I wanted to see if I could save it, and so, of course, a simple project turned into one that was a bit more complicated. Who would have ever seen that coming, eh?
It’ll Buff Out:
Having glued the halves of the CSM together, I applied a hefty amount of Apoxie Sculp putty to the capsule, pressed in crude troughs for the “windows” and filled in the hollow nose. Once it was dry, I began the process of slowly and surely reshaping the blobby front end to at least passably represent the blunt nose of the CSM. While I was doing this, I found some images of museum-piece CSMs, as well as drawings and photos of the real ones in space, and they all had something this model lacked. (No, not just “realism”, “accuracy”, “non-crappiness” or “more-than-one-hand’s finger-count-worth-of-parts”, smart aleck!) there are a number of grey bands that run around most of the hull of the Service Module that this kit doesn’t have.
Strip styrene to the rescue! I had some thin strip styrene, but it was too wide. Thankfully, there are four bands, and the styrene was twice as wide as a band, so two strips of this were glued in place, and then I used Dymo Tape to etch a dividing line halfway through each strip. The result was pretty darned good. There’s also a thicker band of this same kind further up the fuselage, and a single strip of styrene worked perfectly! So that’s an extra four pieces (the engine blocker and three styrene strips) I’d added; how often do you double the piece count in aftermarket? Oh, wait… that’s actually not likely too unheard of, now is it?
Sanding the outer diameter of the CSM was easy enough, and the detail lost was simple enough to rescribe, but the damage to the little RCS clusters was less simple to fix. I did the best I could with them to rescribe around them and recontour what was left. It’s not perfect, but it’s okay. The inside of the thruster bell needed a lot of filling and sanding to get it looking like a single piece, but eventually it came around (pun intended)!
The shaping of the nose went well, and using a needle file I was able to smooth out the window troughs. I know the entire capsule part isn’t perfect, but neither is the rest of the kit, and I think I got it looking decent enough. There should be a quadruple dish communications array on the CSM, too, but I didn’t have anything that would work, and I didn’t feel like further complicating matters by trying to scratch one. For my purposes, the CSM looked good enough to paint.
POW! Right to the Moon!
The lunar base needed a bit of filling and sanding to clear up the craters that used to hold the display arms (I assume) for whatever it was a base for. Some filing, sanding and minor surgery later and I had a chunk of moon. I wanted to have the CSM flying over it, to give a sense of freedom and motion. I have some thin wire, and cut a piece so that the Apollo wouldn’t be too far from the surface, and thus take up unnecessary vertical display room, yet would be far enough to imply it wasn’t about to crash land!
I drilled a small hole in the CSM with my pin vise, and did the same for the moon. Immediately, it became apparent that more would be needed; there wasn’t enough thickness on the moon to stabilize the rod! This was easily fixed by applying a bit of Crayola Model Magic to the underside of the base beneath the hole. When it was time for final assembly, this spongy, foamy material would provide all the counterforce required. Sadly, I hadn’t thought of this when assembling the CSM, or I could have filled it as well. Model Magic is so light that it wouldn’t have made the CSM too heavy. Shoot. Well, now you know, so you won’t make the same mistake!
Colour Me Metal… and Grey:
Painting the moon base was simplicity itself. One quick coat of Rustoleum grey primer, once dry, was covered with some Tamiya XF-19 Sky Grey and the work was mostly done. I have some chalk pastels mixed up that are designed to go over medium grey colours, so I thinned some in Varsol and painted over the entire surface, allowing it to pile up in the “corners” of craters and collect in the smaller depressions, while adding a light variation in tone to the “flat” surface. A swift “dusting” with a paintbrush to even things out when it was dry gave the perfect dusty appearance, and everything was sealed with a quick overcoat of Future floor polish.
Then, because the moon is NOT shiny, I used my Delta Ceramcoat Urethane Indoor/Outdoor Varnish to put a matte coat over the Future, and after a couple of light oversprays I had a nice, flat grey and highly detailed moonscape. I painted the underside black, in case it ended up being on a glass shelf high-up somewhere.
The Apollo was a bit more complex, but not much. I used Rustoleum Fast Drying Metallic Aluminum on the Service Module. On its own, when decanted and airbrushed, this looks amazingly aluminum-like. It’s good enough for some Natural Metal Finishes, like on my Flagon Trainer. However, the general appearance of the Capsule is much chromier, so I had to use something more specialized. I didn’t want to waste my Alclad Chrome or Molotow Chrome on something this small and “quick” (well, that was the intent, anyway) so I used Alclad II Polished Aluminum.
Amazingly, this made the Rustoleum look like just plane-jane old silver! It’s not a true chrome, but the difference was enough to convince you that it could be, and I was very, very pleased with the result! I then painted the thruster bell and RCS jets in MMA Jet Exhaust, and did the “bag” around the engine/aft of the Service Module in Gunship Grey. I used Light Grey on the inside of the Exhaust, and gave the whole back end, as well as the RCS units a wash of Citadel Nuln Oil, to darken them up. The rest of the craft was left “perfect” and gloss coated with Aqua Gloss.
When everything was dry, I simply stuck some thin wire into my CSM and then stuck the other end into the moon base (and the Model Magic below it) and… Voila! My creation was complete!
Conclusions:
The Apollo missions to the moon were certainly the apex of the Space Race, and showed that humanity’s innate curiosity, adventurousness and technical genius were alive and well. It gave a focus to a world in the throes of major cultural upheaval, and a common ground, that, for a short while, united the East and West in a celebration of our race’s greatest triumph.
That many models were made of the equipment associated with this feat is no surprise. Modelling was big with kids and teens at the time, and so was draw of the Space Race and the future of space exploration. Paying homage to such a feat in plastic form was almost a rite of passage back in those days, and for those interested in the history of space travel, the same applies today.
That being said, this particular styrene interpretation of North American Aviation’s pioneering spacecraft is, far and away, likely the simplest and worst of them all. Heck, there’s a MicroMachines toy from the late ‘80s that’s a bit smaller and far more realistic than this thing. However, Academy’s “borrowed” take on this craft has a certain charm as well. It’s old – the mould is likely from back when the Apollo was a current piece of NASA kit – and it’s gleefully simple. It’s not trying to be anything more than a crappy capsule toy masquerading as a model kit.
Still, it has merit. It’s super easy for a beginner, and it has an action feature in the opening “door”. You can slam it together in no time and be off on your own moon adventure. However, if you want something to improve, and maybe try a bit of simple extra detailing, it works for that too. It may be the ultimate expression of Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tree… it’s not so bad, it just needs some love and attention.
Would I recommend this to Real Space fans. Heck no… I’d get lynched! But I would recommend this to people with a bit of interest in space and a good set of basic skills as a challenge. See what you can do with what little you’re given.
I needed a project to break a slump and just get me finishing something again. This was great for that. At the end of the day, I did a bit of scratch building, a bit of horrific-melting-reconstruction, and I had some fun making use of a simple old base and a simple old kit to create something that’s a nice, yet uncomplicated, tribute to one of humanity’s greatest achievements. Surely that’s got to be worth something!
The Sprue Lagoon 