05/11/08

The Moon Race for the Spacemodeler...

Going to the Moon is headline news again. More modelers are beginning to shift their attention and modeling subjects to the vehicles and hardware of Constellation and Apollo. Older modelers, such as myself, never really stopped building the models of the first moon programs. With the reinvigoration of interest in returning to the Moon we find ourselves turning back to building some of our old favorites. But we also have a reinvigorated interest in the history of how man, and more specifically America, got the the moon...the first time. That history spanned from the 1950's through the 1970's. With the revolution in communications that has been brought about by the personal computer and the World Wide Web the little snippets of the otherwise little-known background of just how we got to the Moon are getting easier to dig up and for the modeler-historian to get a better idea and gain an appreciation of the trials, tribulations, and history of Apollo that is much richer than most realize.

I had the special experience of being a consultant to the conservation efforts on the Saturn V vehicles at Johnson Space Center in Houston and the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, AL. During and since my involvement in those projects I have increased my efforts to research and collect information on not just the Saturn V but all of NASA's manned space efforts spanning through the end of the Apollo Program in the mid-1970's and this research has physically taken me across the United States and deep into archives and dark back-in-the-corner storage places. I have had the opportunity to speak to some of the "old timers" involved "behind the scenes" as well as to search through the archives and touch 50-year old hardware that is significant to our going to the Moon the first time. The Web is nice...but seeing, touching, smelling and experiencing the real thing is invaluable.

And so, within the pages of "To The Moon", I will endeavor to present images, documents, reflections, and interpretations of the the age of Apollo from the perspective of a spacemodeler who vividly remembers the heyday of the Apollo years.