Life.com has a great gallery of little models of spacecraft built by NASA engineers.
Photo above is from 1967.
Artists and engineers share this bond: the fruit of their labor is often first embodied in rough, rudimentary form. Namely, a model. Pictured: An early and brilliantly minimalist model of the lunar module that, on July 20, 1969, landed on the moon with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard.Weirdly Beautiful Spacecraft Models
Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books. 9/11 -- the sheer shock of it, the deaths, the sense of violation... More.
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This is surely one of the most adorable animal YouTubes in the history of all internets. (via @maggiekb1 via this blog).... More.
Yves Béhar (who is in an epic struggle with Marc Newson to claim the title of "sexiest industrial designer alive") designed this vibrator. It looks like a Miyazaki cartoon creature. The Form 2 takes a two-pronged approach to the vibrator, giving its user what they're calling "Sensation in Stereo.... More.
Michael Jackson's funeral cost one million dollars. His final outfit cost $35,000, and the flowers cost $16,000. Lord. Obviously I'm no MJ anyhow, but when I die, if there's a mil lying around? Feel free to bury me in nekkid dirt and use the rest to feed pie to starving kids.... More.
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Way cool. Hard to imagine the apollo program started off as something so simple.
I made a pencil holder like that in my 8th grade shop class in 1969!
Is it just my lunchtime, or does that thing look like it's made of processed meat?
Heh! I was thinking it looked like pottery clay, but now it looks like potted meat.
When they sent this to engineering the specs said 11 inches instead of 11 feet.
(cue Stonehendge music)
Aw it's so cute!
To me, the history of the design and engineering of the Apollo program is far more fascinating than the stuff of the missions themselves. Charles Murray wrote a great book about the engineering history of the program. I recall a great bit that when they were working on the Apollo command module, the Chairman of the Company (North American, as I recall) saw that the guys working inside the module kept having to crawl in and out of the module to get tools and such -- a not small problem day-over-day. So he imposed a rule that folks actually inside the module could command anyone in the company - up to and including the Chairman - to run any errand in connection with what was going on in the module itself.
Amazing stuff.
Well, I'm glad the hero model turned out better when they shot the actual landing footage on the moonscape set. I can spot this as a fake right away, paper clips lolz!1!
I think I saw this - or a prop standing in for it - in the engineering episode of "From the Earth to the Moon". It showed the iterative development of the models along with the tough problems and nearly impossible deadlines that the engineers faced - a nice tribute to the behind-the-scenes heroes who made Apollo possible.
Thanks for this. I look at some of these early concepts, and all I can think is "gee, didn't the future look swell?"
unreal, it's as much a testament to how much they did with soo little, as it is a depressing reminder about how little we regarded it soo soon after, and what little we've done since.