Bob Koenn’s Man In Space collection
AMT Man in Space and Hasegawa space shuttle kits.
Having been a rocket scientist as a career and following the space program since I was about 14 this pair of kits in 1/200th scale was perfect to create my own “rocket garden” at home. Both kits are not exactly ideal or highly detailed but in that small scale they are fairly decent. However I did want to make them better than out of the box so I will detail the things I did and the extras I bought to enhance the finished model. Finally, my career was with NASA working on the space shuttle at KSC from beginning to end so I walked down the STS-135 stack in the VAB and took pictures from top to bottom for future use on building accurate shuttle models which I used during my build of the shuttle kit.
First off I had heard of some aftermarket decals and some web browsing found two such items, replacement decal sets from Indycals and from Tango Papa (who mostly makes decals for model rockets but has a set for the AMT kit available which also includes 1/200th shuttle decals). So I purchased both of these decal sets and used many decals from each. Tango Papa includes extras for each and that definitely helped as the Tango Papa decals are very thin and you can destroy them with ease.
Next I stumbled across replacement spacecraft for the Mercury capsule for both the Redstone and Atlas versions as well as the Gemini spacecraft and the Apollo service modules. They are designed by Indycals and 3D printed by Shapeways. Some particularly nice things is that the Mercury escape towers are discrete rather than solid moldings with the structure in relief as in the kit, a huge step up in quality and accuracy. The Gemini spacecraft also mounts flush with the Titan booster rather than leaving a noticeable gap around the circumference. The nice things about the Apollo SMs are they have much better detailing and discrete RCS thrusters rather than molded on thrusters although they are a bit difficult to work with being so tiny. And all the spacecraft have much better detail than the kit.
In building the AMT kit I tried to also increase the accuracy and did some cutting and removing of incorrect details on the Saturn 5 kit which required rescribing some of the corrugations where items were removed. All the painting was made as accurate to the actual vehicles as possible. On the Atlas and Titans I used Alclad metallic paints and used different shades of steel or aluminum to add depth to the paint jobs. On the Redstone and Titan rockets I used the decals from Indycals or Tango Papa as appropriate. I used very few decals from the kit. On the Saturn 1B I added very thin plastic sheet to simulate the 1st stage antennas. For painting the base coats of white were done with Krylon rattle can semi-gloss white and the detail work was with Testors or Vallejo airbrushed paints.
I started doing a Lindberg shuttle but after getting about half way through I became disappointed with the low level of detail, particularly on the tank, and bought a Hasegawa kit. Both kits come with the ET and SRB in two halves molded as one piece which is really bad. So on both kits I ended up cutting the SRBs away from the tank. This left a rather mutilated inner surface on the SRBs which required puttying, splicing partial SRB doubler pieces, and a lot of sanding but was well worth it in the end. It was easier to fix the joint on the tank with putty and sanding than the SRBs.
On the ET I removed the old anti-geyser line that only flew the first five missions by simply sanding it off. When I had the tank ready for painting I sprayed it with a coat of Faux Fabrix textured spray paint on the tank after masking off the detailed lines to give the tank a simulated rough finish as with the foam sprayed on the real ET. I then mixed up the two shades of orange paint as close as I could to match the ET coloring. For the darker areas I used a mix of Floquil caboose cab orange and D&RGW building brown and for the inner tank I used a mix of caboose cab orange and earth. The very light areas that are left after shaving of the foam I painted with Floquil armor yellow. After getting large surface areas of the tank painted I did all the detail work by hand with very fine paint brushes.
The SRBs were primed and then painted with Kyrlon semi-gloss white. On the first SRB I finished I masked the doubler rings but ended up cleaning them up by hand so on the second SRB I did all the detail work by hand. I added Aves putty around the lower rings to simulate the foam ablative that is on the actual boosters. I then used the “Loaded” decals from the Indycals sheet to correctly label the SRB segments.
I decided to simulate the actual ET/SRB attach links and did this with music wire and small diameter aluminum tubing of two diameters to simulate the aft structural links. I also did more detailing on the orbiter aft structural mating struts and added a LH2 line from the bottom of the tank as well as extending the LO2 line to the orbiter. I painted the tank to fairly closely match the STS-135 tank.
The orbiter was pretty much stock from the kit but I did use the Indycal decals along with the kit decals for better accuracy. I did extensive masking and hand detailing using pictures of the orbiter I had downloaded from the web. I detailed the “flipper” doors that seal the cove between the wing and elevens using rub on model railroad striping. I was very happy with the way the orbiter turned out after all the work.
The base was a wood plaque from Michael’s and I took a sheet of thin plastic and scribed it and painted it to simulate a concrete pad as at the KSC rocket garden.
Ultimately the finished product made me very happy after the extensive effort and many hours I put into this project and I now have my own “rocket garden” displaying all the US manned spacecraft and launch vehicles.
Bob Koenn
