Ever since watching John Glenn blast off on February 20 1962, I have been a spaceflight nerd. Space travel soon created a large footprint in the culture of 1960s in the U.S., with many television shows either about space flight (Lost In Space, Star Trek), with astronauts (I Dream of Jeannie), or aliens (My Favorite Martian) as lead characters.
So I built all the spacecraft and rocket model kits I could get my parents to buy for me. Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica (original series) – I meticulously glued the models together and painted them to look like they did in “reality” (sometimes the picture on the box didn’t completely match what you saw on the screen). I have some models that are so old the glue has dried out and they have pieces falling off.
Though I have built airplanes, boats, and things with various numbers of wheels, spaceships are still my favorite, whether from a kit, “random” pieces of metal and plastic or LEGO bricks, (virtual and physical). Not unlike the character in the Jimmy Buffet song “A Pirate Looks at Forty” who bemoans “Yes I am a pirate / 200 years too late”, for me its “Yes, I am a starship builder / 200 years too early”.
Shouter to Dead Parrots 