Nice thing about spacey things is almost anything can qualify, and I since am a hardcore spaceship geek and have been since my early years, I can usually make space things out of whatever. I watched the launch of John Glenn on February 20, 1962 on our little black & white television (I was home from school with chicken pox) and that was it – from that day on until the early era of the Space Shuttle, I went out of my way to watch every American manned spaceflight launch.
When other boys built model kits of cars and tanks, I was meticulously painting my Revell 1/24 scale Gemini space craft to match the appearance I saw in Life magazine. (I painted the first one green because the Life magazine photos of Ed White’s spacewalk from Gemini 4 had terrible color balance – Mercury and Gemini were both flat black. Life magazine did eventually get the colors right and so did I).
I built Revell model kits of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo – my all-time favorite was the three foot tall 1/144 scale model of Saturn V/Apollo, which held a place of honor in my living space for the next decade or so. (I still want that Lego Saturn V introduced a few years ago).
I built a lot of spaceships in my mind, and some in plastic from parts taken from other model kits. (This is what professional model designers and builders do for movie props – a lot of “kit bashing”). The results looked exactly like they were glued together by an 8-year-old. I’ve gotten better by now – mostly.
Ray Bradbury wrote of rockets as “The Machineries of Joy“, and so they were in my childhood. And early adulthood, and well, still.
We are in a new golden age of rocketry, and the first on my fan list is Falcon 9 Heavy. It is now common practice for Falcon 9 missions to fly the first stage back to Cape Canaveral and set it down right in the middle of the “X” on the landing pad. (Of course my One True Rocket Love is and will remain the Saturn V).
At 8:00 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, September 8, 1966, Star Trek first appeared on the black and white television in our living room. At the age of 11 years and 5 months I became an “OG” Trekkie. Later I was excited to find that the show was in color! (We did not get a color TV until much later). So yeah, a lot of the space things I build sort of have warp nacelles – the design of the original Enterprise (which I have seen at the National Air and Space Museum) has stuck for over 50 years, despite its many “real world” flaws – but hey we start with the notion of travelling faster than light, so bickering about how the space ships should “really” be like is amusing and hard core fan geekdom.
So without further adieu, here is a sample of the space vehicles which have sprung from my adult imagination.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find all the variations of this speech and rank by delivery, inspiration, or plain scenery chewing.
Shouter to Dead Parrots 