Way, way back when I was a spudlet (or a new potato if you will…), men were landing on the moon (and before you start, yes, they were…) and this was something that excited many young tubers of about my age. Knowing that this subject did indeed fascinate me, and although I was far too young for it really, someone once upon a long ago, had the rather bright idea of buying for me a rather splendid Airfix model kit of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the very vessel that had transported men to the moon, so that I could have one of my very own to stimulate my imagination and inspire me to fulfil whatever dreams I may have had back then.
For various reasons, not least my relative youthfulness, the actual construction of this delightful project fell into the hands of my sister who built the whole thing for me and painted it. Nowadays, of course, I know that the paint scheme didn’t actually match any of the actual rockets that took off on the moon missions, but that never really mattered. She was young, it was the 1970s and she rather happily never got over-burdened with my pernickety obsessions for detail. Never the less, the fine results of her labours stood tall and proud in the various bedrooms I inhabited as I grew up into the jacketed potato that I became, before eventually being dismantled and placed into one of the various cardboard boxes that it languished in throughout my sophisticated “adult” years.
It’s ironic really that she did this for me, because the real Saturn V, the largest and most powerful launch vehicle ever brought to operational status, was also a project that was undertaken by other people than those who ended up using it, although the many people who worked on the Apollo programme probably hoped that their work was for the good of all mankind even if, in practical terms, it ended up being used only by three people who did little of the actual construction work themselves (although they were heavily involved with a lot of the technical consultation), but benefited greatly from the work the others put in.
I’ve read that 400,000 people were involved in some small way with the Apollo programme and the construction of the original rockets (as opposed to just my sister with some glue and a bit of paint…) every little part of which had to work perfectly just once. A fully operational Saturn V rocket came in at 363 feet tall and weighed over six and a half million pounds and the one that sent men to the moon ended up costing approximately 185 million dollars which would work out at about 1.1 billion dollars nowadays. It contained over 3 million parts which made up 700,000 components and remains one of the greatest engineering accomplishments that humanity has ever achieved.
I still hear people say every now and again that space exploration is a waste of time and money and we’d be better off spending the money on other things, but that is to ignore all the benefits that humanity got from the things that had to be developed for the space programme from computer technology, to better trainers and from solar energy to ultrasound scanners, not forgetting all those satellites that make all our mobile phones and web activity just a tad more possible. In fact there are so many that I’d be boring you for weeks if I decided to write about all of them.
Sadly many of the “space age” dreams that people of my kind of age had came crashing down in the brutal inflationary years that the 1970s became, although from the ruins of the Apollo programme came the Shuttle programme which is even now approaching its last hurrah. ‘Discovery’ took off on its final flight a couple of days ago, and there are only two more planned launchings of the Space Shuttle, so I really don’t think I’m going to realise one of my ambitions which was to attend one of the launches. Still, one day I’d like to go to Florida and look at any of the Saturn Fives that they have on display there and see one of them for myself and get up close and personal with that little bit of history that took my breath away when I was still young enough to be simply impressed by such things.
I still have most of that Airfix model in a box in the room I’m currently writing this in. For a while recently, around the time of the 40th anniversary of that historic first moon landing, I put all the remaining bits I still had together and they stood for a few weeks on a shelf behind me. Sadly, and inexplicably, some of the parts have been misplaced, although I’m sure they’ll turn up one day. One of the lower fins and one of the five main engines are gone, as is everything for the very top of the model, above the service module (the cylindrical bit below the pointy bit where the astronauts actually sat) including the heatshield and the escape tower.
I had to dismantle it because, every so often the breeze would get up and it would all come crashing down, not least due to the wobbly foundations caused by that missing engine. I eventually realised that this was probably doing the remaining pieces more harm than good, so I reluctantly put all the bits back into a box, where they remain, hoping for the glorious day when the missing parts show up and I can perhaps glue the whole thing together into a more robust, complete and satisfactory facsimile of the transport that made one of mankind’s greatest adventures possible.
If anyone reading this should happen to have any spare bits of their own old kit lying around in a box or a drawer somewhere which might help restore that battered old relic from the childhood of this battered old relic and are willing to part with them, well, I’d love to hear from you, and you’d be making me (relatively) happy. As to whether you’d want to make me happy, well, that’s a different topic for a different day, but such an offer would be very gratefully received.
