Space Shuttle Launch Pad 39A with Challenger STS-6 (1:144)

[spacerunner]

Hello friends,

don't be surprised about my long break, but firstly I still need new seals for my airbrush gun before I can paint the ladders for the Payload Canister and secondly I'm very busy preparing for my trip to Florida, to which I'll fly on October 2nd from Stuttgart via Atlanta to Orlando.

From there I'll drive with a rental car to Cocoa Beach, check in there for a week in the Best Western Hotel and hope that I can watch the Psyche Launch of a Falcon 9 Heavy from the Apollo Saturn V Center, which is scheduled for the 5th October 10.38 am.

And if everything goes well, I'll be very close to you in four weeks today.

So please keep your fingers crossed!

[spacerunner]

Hello everybody,

my Florida trip is getting closer and closer and time is running out, so I have to rush with an update.

In 14 days (October 2nd) at this time I will be on board a Boeing 767-300 towards Atlanta, from where it will continue at 6.35 p.m. in a Boeing 757 to Orlando.

From there I drive the next day with the rental car to Cocoa Beach, where I'll stay at the Best Western Cocoa Beach Hotel for a week and will visit the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

The highlight will rise there according to plan on 5. October, if according to the current schedule at 10.38 a.m. a SpaceX Falcon 9 Heavy is supposed to take off from Launch Pad 39A for the NASA Psyche Mission.


Source: kennedyspacecenter.com

Hopefully the schedule stays that way, because I bought tickets for my friend Mike Robel and me for watching the liftoff from the Apollo/Saturn V Center, who lives in Merritt Island and is a loyal follower of my construction report in the NASASpaceflight forum.

In the meantime, I've dealt again with the Diorama planning.

Together with my friend Arno (McPhönix), who has built the Current bank for the LED lighting, we have checked the cabling again to get a more detailed overview of the respective connections and interfaces on the Diorama.

To do this, I rolled out my Dio floor plan again and temporarily placed some prefabricated assemblies on it for illustration, what with the Tower and the RSS was again a shaky and stressful affair.



In memory of my friend Thomas Emberger (golgi863), who died six years ago, I put his Hammerhead Crane with Lightning Mast on his FSS Tower, which his wife had left to me as an estate at the time.

Then I've added a few more models, for which I would like to show the following pictures here in a loose sequence without many words.

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I hope that you like the images and that they compensate a bit for the longer break, as well as that they provide a good overview of the diorama, on the floor plan of which I will now mark and measure the essential cabling routes for a detailed planning, which I definitely want to do before my departure.

[spacerunner]

Hello friends,

in the meantime I have dismantled the fragile Dio assemblies and stowed them in a cupboard, better safe than sorry.

I showed this image years ago when I presented Thomas' model building estate. He had made a small scaffolding platform especially for his Hammerhead Crane, on which the crane equipped with LED lamps with the red warning beacon on the top of the lightning protection mast could stand reasonably safely.

Such a beacon never existed there at any time during the Shuttle program, which he initially had vehemently denied and then finally accepted when I provided him with the photos as evidence, but his Beacon remains on it, as he wanted it at that time.



And because we're reminiscing so nicely, I have a little bonus here, namely the simulated legendary Stunt of my friend James MacLaren standing on the top of the mast of Pad 39B, which he helped build.


Source: James MacLaren -16streets.com







He's currently in the middle of moving inland from Cocoa Beach, but if time allows, we could perhaps meet short-dated, which I would be very happy about.