The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I’ve been a real space exploration geek for as long as I’ve been a fan of the fictional space adventures and in my experience quite a lot of SF fans are also fascinated with real life space exploration and astronomy. So I’ve been following with great interest a series of posts on the BBC website which celebrates one of the greatest landmarks not only in the (still young) history of space travel but one of the greatest accomplishments in the entire history of human exploration, the Apollo lunar missions. This year marks the 40th anniversary since humans first left the cradle and walked on the surface of a heavenly body that wasn’t our own planet Earth. Think about that for a moment – thousands and thousands of years of human civilisation and yet this was something no person had ever done before in all of recorded history and to this day only a small handful of humans has done. They really went where no man has gone before.

Sadly forty years later many of the promises of the Space Age in which I was born are still to materialise – I don’t drive a jetcopter to work and my holidays on the Moon are still but a dream (sigh…). But my inner geek still fires up like a rocket at the thought of those Apollo missions, just a few decades from the birth of powered flight people put together a truly massive machine to fly to the Moon. As my dad once remarked to me, his gran went from horse-drawn carts delivering the milk to seeing passenger jets to watching a man walk on the Moon on television all within her lifetime. Its too easy to forget what an astonishing accomplishment it was, the ingenuity and sheer bravery it took and the losses it cost along the way.

And as I’m reading this BBC article I hear from Michael Reccia. Michael is no stranger to many of our readers as he is the driving force behind the popular Sci-Fi and Fantasy Modeller which I’ve mentioned on here many times and which has featured models and effects from Thunderbirds to The Dark Knight, as well as some fascinating insights into how those effects were accomplished. But with this fortieth anniversary of the Moon landing beckoning (July 20th) he and his crew have decided to grace us with a new publication: Real Space Modeller. As the title implies this is a rather timely publication which celebrates detailed model making of vehicles and events in real, historical space exploration, including in this first issue the truly awesome Saturn V, the gigantic rocket which carried men to our closest neighbour atop a column of fire, the famous X-15 rocket plane and the Space Shuttle, due to hit orbit in July.