Bill Hedges’ Vera Castle

For years after Lost In Space was canceled the only picture of an alien spaceship from the show that I had was the Vera Castle from the “Condemned Of Space” view-master, so it remained a favorite of mine. Recently I was able to obtain an original studio blueprint of the miniature spaceship, and so as not to let it go to waste, I decided to build a model from it. The original “miniature” would have been over 9′ at its widest. That made it large enough for the 1′ miniature Jupiter 2 to land on it. Since the blueprints were 1 to 4 scale, I took my measurements directly from the blueprint to make a more displayable 2′ 4″ wide model.

I started out using a 12″ globe for the main sphere, and glued a section of that to a plywood ring. That provided a form to wrap and glue a styrene rim around it. The upper sphere I made from styrofoam balls and plastered over them, and for the collar between the two spheres, I made by laminating layers of sheet styrene. I thought I could use a cardboard shipping tube for the three “outriggers”, but I couldn’t find one the right size, so I bought a 2-1/2″ acrylic cylinder to use instead. That worked out better because to create the rectangular windows, all I had to do was mask them off before I painted it. I drilled out all the holes for the LED lights and first painted it with a hammertone spray to give it the texture seen in screen captures of it. Then I finished with a blue, and finally added lighter blue stripes with an airbrush.

After it was painted, I added LEDs to it. It ended up with a total of seventy-two 5mm LEDs. Those in the middle were flashing LEDs. I had already installed the cylinder LEDs before I painted it. I made some styrene antennas for it for the upper sphere and wooden ones for the bottom. The whole model is made up of four sections. A 3/8″ threaded lamp rod comes up from the large sphere to hold the collar and upper sphere in place, and three screws attach the lower half to the upper, leaving access to the batteries. The lamp rod also allows a wire to run through it in case I want to suspend it from the ceiling. To set it on a table it needs the plastic base to hold it.

The original miniature spaceship seems to have been made partially from the alien machine in “Wreck Of The Robot” . The blueprint specifies that they were to use stock blister assembles for the two spheres, but that the outriggers were to be made new. It would later appear two more times using stock footage of it, in the episodes “Princess Of Space” and “Two Weeks In Space”

Bill Hedges