The Magazine for LEGO® Enthusiasts of All Ages! Issue 60 • December 2019
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Flynn DeMarco’s Treasure of the Snake Queen Stacy Sterling’s LEGO® Haunted House
Building A Scene from Alien
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Issue 60 • December 2019
Contents
From the Editor....................................................2
People
Scaling a Mountain: Our Adventure Building Treasure of the Snake Queen........................3 Iain Heath: Building an ALIEN Moment.....................12 Stacy Sterling’s Haunted Dollhouse........16
Building Koen Van Der Biest: LEGO Sculptor................................................22 Building the New York City Skyline: One Skyscraper at a Time!........................28 Djordje Dobrosavljevic: Building Beasts!.............................................36 Minifigure Customization 101: Where in the World is..................................40 You Can Build It: MINI Ecto 1......................................................44 Leonid An’s Figure Builds.............................51
Community
Building to Heal: Amy Willis and TherapeuticLUG............54 Crazy Arms: Custom Poseable Arms for LEGO Minifigures..................................57 Jürgen Kropp: Celebrating Kennedy Space Center.....60 Presenting the Ultimate Skylab Set!.......64 Building the Man on the Moon................70 Building a Space Program: An Interview with Corvin Stichert........72 Community Ads...............................................78 Last Word.............................................................79 Bricks in the Middle........................................80
From the Editor: From Star Wars to, um... spooky places. Yeah, it’s a bit late. Halloween was a couple of months ago. But the magazine has a lead time of two months, and the covers have a lead time of six months! A lot can happen that is unseen... and this issue was the result of me reaching out to social media to figure out a theme.
December 2019 Issue 60 Publisher John Morrow
Editor in Chief Joe Meno
Photography Editor Geoff Gray Proofreader John Morrow
Japanese Bureau Editor Nathan Bryan West Coast Editors Ashley Glennon
LEGO Ideas Correspondent Glen Wadleigh
Contributors: Leonid An, Richard Board, Jared Burks, Joseph Chambers, Christopher Deck, Djordje Dobrosavljevic, Flynn DeMarco, Iain Heath, Vaughn Himber, Jürgen Kropp, Chris Malloy, Deepak Shenoy, Stacy Sterling, Corvin Stichert, Holly Webster, Amy Willis, and Kevin Hinkle.
There’s a lot in this issue beyond the spooky. There’s some space stuff, and some architecture. There’s also an article on the healing power of building. It’s an interesting mix, and I hope that you enjoy reading through it! One article, though, did not make it—Holly Webster’s article will be in next issue. Also, due the ongoing trade dispute and tariffs on printing (which we hope will be resolved soon), we were forced to raise the cover price and subscription rates. But I have plenty of fun stuff planned for future issues, so I hope you’ll feel BrickJournal is still worth the small increase in price. Since this is the last issue of 2019, Happy Holidays, and I hope to see you in 2020!! Joe Meno, Editor P.S. Have ideas or comments? Drop me a line at brickjournal@gmail.com. I’m open to suggestions and comments and will do my best to reply. P.P.S... Yes, BrickJournal has a website — www.brickjournal.com! Twitter? Yep, there too — http://twitter.com/brickjournal. Facebook? Yup — http://www.facebook.com/group. php?gid=58728699914&ref=mf. Or you can scan the bottom codes with a QR reader! P.P.P.S. If you want info on a subscription, you can go to www.twomorrows.com or scan below!
Website
Subscriptions
Many thanks to the websites who have served as mirrors for BrickJournal:
www.LUGNET.com, www.Brickshelf.com, www.peeron.com, www.brickmodder.net www.rustyclank.com
About the Cover: The Treasure of the Snake Queen is somewhere in this incredible layout. Photo provided by Flynn DeMarco. About the Contents: Two rockets point skyward from Jürgen Kropp’s Kennedy Space Center-inspired layout. Photo provided by Jürgen Kropp.
Glossary AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO) AFFOL (Adult Female Fan of LEGO) TFFOL (Teen Female Fan of LEGO) NLSO (Non-LEGO Significant Other) MOC (My Own Creation) TLG (The LEGO Group) BURP (Big Ugly Rock Piece) LURP (Little Ugly Rock Piece) POOP (Pieces—that can be or should be made—Of Other Pieces)
SNOT (Studs Not on Top) LUG (LEGO Users Group) LTC (LEGO Train Club) MECHA (a large armored robot on legs, typically controlled by a pilot seated inside) MECH (a large piloted combat robot) DARK AGES (usually teen years, when you drift away from building) STUDS OUT (building where the studs on bricks face the viewer)
LEGO®, TECHNIC, MINDSTORMS, Belville, Scala, BIONICLE, ExoForce, Mars Mission, World City, and other LEGO theme lines are trademarks of the LEGO Group of companies. All articles, photos, and art are copyright BrickJournal Media, LLC 2011, TwoMorrows Publishing and the respective writers, photographers, and artists. All rights reserved. All trademarked items are the property of their respective owners and licensees. Subscriptions are $67 Economy US, $79 Expedited US, $101 International, or $27 Digital Only and can be purchased at www.twomorrows.com or payment sent to: TwoMorrows Publishing, 10407 Bedfordtown Drive, Raleigh, NC 27614 USA. The editorial/advertising office address for BrickJournal is: BrickJournal Editor, 9001 Barb Anne Court, Springfield, VA 22152, USA or admin@brickjournal.com. First Printing. Printed in China. ISSN 1941-2347. BrickJournal and its staff would like to thank the LDraw community for the software it makes available to the community, which we use for making all of the instructions and renderings in this magazine. We would especially like to thank Kevin Clague for his continued upgrades of the LPub tool that is a part of the LDraw suite. For more information, please visit http://www.ldraw.org.
B
uilding a small MOC from scratch can be a daunting task. Building a MOC meant to be 4 ft. square and 4½ ft. tall is an entirely different level of daunting. Add storytelling, two EV3 brains, eight motors, eight sensors, an arduino microcontroller, lights and sound, and you have a recipe for either success or a mess. Fortunately, our experience was of the former, but there was certainly plenty of the latter along the way!
People
Act 1: Planning & Design Hot on the heels of our Best In Show and Public Choice wins for our first large MOC display, California Dreamin’ (featured in BrickJournal #50), we decided to go in a different direction for our next project. Where California Dreamin’ was wide and sprawling, we went for something tall and relatively narrow. One of the things people seemed to love about CD was the movement and the storytelling. We had small stories happening all through it for people to look at and discover. For this next project however, we thought it would be fun to tell one central story, a narrative that people could follow from beginning to end. We knew people would be walking by in a crowded convention situation and it needed to grab their attention, be short enough to take in quickly, and most importantly, be accessible enough to be understood by anyone watching, regardless of language. Being avid gamers, both video and tabletop, we both have a strong affinity for the fantasy genre. Dungeons & Dragons has been a part of both of our lives, together and separately, for years, so we figured that was a great jumping-off point—a classic adventure story that could be told visually. Once we had settled on that, we looked at the stories we loved and started picking out classic scenes that people would recognize. Like any good D&D adventure, it had to start in a village. The theme for Bricks by the Bay that year was animation and I was immediately struck by the movement meaning, but also the “cartoon” angle. In my head I was watching the cast of ScoobyDoo or the Flintstones running in the center of the screen while the same background scrolled behind them on
Scaling a Mountain: Our Adventure Building Treasure of the Snake Queen Article and Photography by Flynn DeMarco and Richard Board of TrickyBricks Additional Photos by Davin White 3
Inspiration and sketches are seen here, with rough layouts drawn out on paper. At the right is Maleficent’s castle from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, designed by Evyind Earle.
an infinite loop. What if our first scene was a classic D&D party of five (Barbarian, magic user, Dwarven fighter, thief, archer) passing through a village? The concept would be the minifigures moving in place while village buildings, which were built onto 9v train cars, would pass behind them. Once we had established that this was viable, the rest of it all sort of fell together. We would tell our story in six parts, each in a different location. Some of those locations were classic fantasy tropes: Bucolic village, spooky forest, haunted cave, gloomy crypt, and of course, the imposing castle of the titular Snake Queen. But how to move our figures through this epic adventure? When making California Dreamin’, we had experimented with a couple of small mechanics utilizing EV3 motors and sensors, including a moving shark and a bear that popped out of a cave. These were great, but we knew that we would need more than a few simple machines if we really wanted to impress. Even at this early stage, we knew four motors would not be enough to accomplish our many movement goals, so we purchased a second EV3, which gave us another four motors and four sensors to help meet our goals. We also quickly realized that each scene would need its own set of five figures in order for them to be visible in each section.
The interior of the layout, showing the conveyor belts in the center used to move the party of minifigures.
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Once the various scenes were settled on, Richard started working on mechanical prototypes, and we decided that conveyor belts would be our best method of movement for the bulk of the story. After some consideration, we felt that six scenes of conveyor belts would get boring quickly, so we opted to utilize turntables for the final two scenes of the story. During this phase we were also looking at source material for the castle. A simple internet search for “spooky castle” resulted in a lot of cool images, but the one we kept coming back to was Maleficent’s castle from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Designed by exceptional artist Eyvind Earle, it had everything we wanted, and we would return to his designs many times over the building process. We also made several drawings of our own to figure out the eventual layout of the full MOC. The entire initial design and concept phase took about a month, but we would end up changing and adding things in a more organic way throughout the building process.
Once upon a time, a band of adventurers went to find the Treasure of the Snake Queen.
They crossed creepy forests...
...and eerie crypts...
...and encountered a two-headed dragon...
...and spooky caverns...
...but they were not prepared for what they would find at the Snake Queen’s castle. Will the adventurers prevail?
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People
Stacy’s Haunted Dollhouse.
Stacy Sterling’s
Haunted Dollhouse Article by Stacy Sterling Photography by Chris Malloy
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In our house, it’s Halloween most of the year—spooky decorations, lots of black, skulls... you get the idea. Growing up, I was the kid who spent her summers eagerly accompanying Nancy Drew on her adventures and solving mysteries; watching episodes of the Addams Family and wishing that I could be Wednesday Addams; staying up late to watch episodes of Tales from the Crypt and scaring myself in the process. When I started building again as an adult, it would come as no surprise that many of my builds would be influenced by these things. One of my first truly ambitious builds as an adult was the Addams Family house. The goal was to recreate every detail on the interior as well as the exterior of the house, and then tuck it into our city layout and see just how many people would recognize it. The hours spent searching for photos of the interior so that I could get all the details just right was the most exciting part of the build for me… that is, until I realized that most people would never see the interior unless I was there to show them. It was disappointing to know that some of the best features of the house, and some of the most unique little creations, were ones that only I would ever see. That didn’t stop me from creating detailed interiors for all of my buildings, because that was something I loved doing, but it did make me think more about different ways to show off the interior of my creations. It wasn’t until I saw Heather “LEGOgirl” Braaten’s incredibly detailed dollhouse at BrickCon that I realized this would be the perfect way to show off the interiors of my buildings without having to take them apart floor-by-floor. Her builds were what inspired me to build my own version of a dollhouse that reflected my interests: Gothic and Second Empire Victorian-inspired architecture, and the macabre.
The build itself started with a table scrap, as many of my builds do. It was a window design that I had created and then set aside on my building table, hoping that someday it would spark an idea and find its way into a MOC. My building table is littered with these table scraps just waiting for the right MOC to be built around them, and most of the table scraps come to be as I’m sorting or parting out sets. I find that when I’m sorting I’m more likely to look at pieces from a different perspective—maybe I use the underside of the brick as a decorative feature on the exterior wall because the stud pattern looks like bas relief panel, or the thin Technic lift arms (3 x 3 L-shape with quarter ellipse) because they look like iron scrollwork on a balcony. I am able to see ways to use parts in a manner other than how they were intended
Window Dressing
The windows and doors of Stacy’s house are decorated with parts to accentuate the creepiness of the setting. A breakdown below shows that only a few parts are needed to haunt a house!
A look inside the house.
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Building
Koen Van Der Biest: LEGO Sculptor! Article and Photography by Koen Van Der Biest
European comic character Asterix.
Koen Van Der Biest is a builder that lives in the town of Mol, Belgium. He works as a supervisor in a company that produces pharmaceutical products, and in his off time builds large-scale LEGO figures. BrickJournal talked to him about his sculptures. BrickJournal: How long have you been building? Koen Van Der Biest: From the moment I got my first LEGO set somewhere around 1983—set 3654, a small Fabuland ‘country cottage.’ Interesting fact: I still use that first Fabuland figure—Lisa Lamb—as my avatar. I don’t remember it that well, but it must have been love at first sight because after that, all I wanted was more Fabuland, and when I got older I wanted more LEGO. What I love about the boxes in that period, and miss about the current boxes, are the alternate builds depicted on the back and on the sides of the boxes, for which there were no instructions. It was a challenge trying to build them, and I truly believe that’s where my insight of how to build with LEGO came from. It forces you to convert something you see into LEGO, not just follow some step-by-step instructions. When growing up, my focus shifted more towards Technic. That was the result of a memorable moment when I got a Technic tractor (set 8849) for my birthday! My favorite vehicle and favorite toy combined—wow! Needless to say I made a lot of farm equipment as a kid. Take note that I did not make any sculptures in my youth. Those came much later. I vaguely remember trying to build a cow and a lion, but without success. Did you have a Dark Age? If so, what got you out of it? Yes, as many AFOLs do, I too went to the infamous Dark Age. My interest in LEGO faded away during the college years, and disappeared during my high school days. I’m sure that sounds familiar to many AFOLs. It was only when I started working and got the cash I didn’t have as a kid, that I got back into LEGO. What got me out of it were two things: Number one was set 8455—a Technic backhoe. I hesitated before buying it because it was studless and I was more a Technic bricks guy (I still am today), but hey, it was a tractor! And it had ten pneumatic cylinders! Number two was the discovery of Bricklink. I am 100% sure that without Bricklink, I wouldn’t be here today talking to you. Suddenly a whole new world opened up, with only money as a limitation. The first thing I did on Bricklink was orderer parts I lacked during my childhood. I believe my first order was for Technic caterpillar tracks... finally, after all these years, I could make an excavator! And just like that, the little boy in me was back. What is your favorite theme? Of all-time, I choose Fabuland for nostalgic reasons. That’s where it all started for me. I like the bright colors of it, I like the Fabuland figures. I like them so much I am currently designing upscaled versions of those figures in a 6:1 scale. And I have even bigger plans with that project but it’s still a work in progress, so I will leave that as a surprise.
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When we are talking about the current themes, I prefer the creator series because that’s what LEGO is all about, in my opinion. It promotes building alternate things, it has useful parts, it’s not as expensive as licensed products, and the focus is not on the minifigures. (I’m probably the only
AFOL that does not care about minifigures at all (although I do make upscaled versions of them... am I weird?). Anyhow, Creator is not for building a model that sits on a shelf for years and years. It’s designed to put in a big pile and start building away! What inspired you to build large sculptures? When I got out of my Dark Ages, I kind of continued where I left off, building cranes, tractors, trucks in a mixed Technic/model-team style—the difference being that I had more parts now, and more access to pictures and blueprints. The interest in sculptures sparked when I stumbled upon the site of Eric Harshbarger. (http://www.ericharshbarger.org/LEGO/) Wow! How did he do that? I was so impressed with his work. It was so different than anything I saw before. So I started to try it myself. First I made an Easter bunny, then a nativity scene. They were nowhere near as good as Eric’s models, but I was hooked. What I also found interesting was that building large sculptures out of basic bricks was something that not a lot of people were doing. When I entered our local LUG (BeLUG) in 2007, I was a bit of an outsider. I didn’t do trains, I didn’t do minifigures, I did sculptures... say what? But I got similar reactions from the public like I had when seeing Eric’s work at first... “Wow! How do you do this?”
Dopey, one of Walt Disney’s Seven Dwarves. Garfield.
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Building
Deepak’s skyline: The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Hearst Tower, 70 Pine Street, and 40 Wall Street.
Building the New York City Skyline:
One Skyscraper at a Time! Article and Photography by Deepak Shenoy
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Skyscrapers have held a great fascination for me ever since I was a child growing up in India. Back then I had never seen any skyscrapers in real life, but I couldn’t help being awestruck by the few pictures I had come across of skyscrapers in cities like New York and Chicago. It just blew my mind to think of buildings that could rise a hundred stories or more into the sky. Little did I know then, that it was only a matter of time before I would find myself living in the US, not too far from New York—the one city that is most synonymous with skyscrapers. Over the 25 years that I have now lived in the US, I have visited New York numerous times, but my fascination with skyscrapers has not waned one bit. In fact, to this day when I visit New York, I still marvel at the skyscrapers there with wide-eyed wonder—as if I am seeing them for the first time. Going from being just a skyscraper enthusiast to actually building models of them using thousands of LEGO pieces was still quite a leap to make—especially for someone who never played with LEGO as a child. While I had been vaguely familiar with LEGO as an adult living in the US, I never had a chance to get my hands on any actual bricks until my daughter received a LEGO Creative Bucket as a birthday gift. As I helped her put together simple models using the instructions that came with the set, I became quite impressed by the quality of this so-called children’s toy. The plastic bricks were built to remarkably tight tolerances and fit together with just the right amount of friction. The beauty of this toy was that it was endlessly reconfigurable, and the only thing limiting you was your imagination. It wasn’t long before my daughter grew tired of building the same animals and vehicles over and over again and was ready to move on to something bigger and more original. She suggested that we try creating a “really tall building” with LEGO. That was just the “a-ha” moment I needed to realize that I could use LEGO as a medium to create my own versions of the skyscrapers that I had long admired. The first skyscraper that came to mind was the Empire State Building and I started wondering what it would take to create a version of it using LEGO.
Showing off the skyline at Brickfair Virginia 2019.
A little bit of digging on the internet opened my eyes to a lot of things that I had been completely oblivious to: The large worldwide community of adult fans of LEGO (aka AFOLs), the wide and impressive array of LEGO creations (aka MOCs) out there that I could take inspiration from, and of course Bricklink—a site I could use to order all the LEGO pieces I needed. It also became apparent that I was far from the first person to think about building a LEGO version of the Empire State Building. In fact, I was a little surprised by the sheer number of different versions already out there—everything from small and simplistic (like the LEGO official set 21002) to a massive 25-foot tall model that was once displayed in the Toys ’R’ Us store in Times Square, New York. Out of all these versions, the one that caught my eye was the model built by Sean Kenney (which had been displayed in the gift shop at the top of the actual Empire State Building). It seemed to hit the sweet spot in terms of scale—it was big enough to be able to capture most of the relevant details from the real building, and yet it was not so big that it would be too unwieldy or costly to build. If I was going to build my own version of the Empire State Building, I didn’t want it to be simply a copy of Sean Kenney’s model. I wanted to start with the dimensions of the actual building and figure out for myself how these dimensions would map to LEGO. I was excited by the prospect of being able to design and build something that would be my own unique creation. And while the roles had sort of reversed (now it would be my daughter helping me with my builds, instead of the other way around), this hobby would still give me the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time with her, and that was like the icing on the cake. Needless to say, after diving headlong into this hobby with my first MOC (the Empire State Building) a little over two years ago, I have continued to build models of some of the other skyscrapers that make up New York’s skyline (the five models I have completed so far have used a total of over 85,000 LEGO pieces!).
Deepak Shenoy.
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Building
Djordje Dobrosavljevic is a builder who builds with mostly Bionicle parts, which means that he spends a lot of time creating organic builds that can look perfectly creepy. His latest model made the rounds online on Flickr (his Flickr name is djokson) and is featured here! He also took time out to talk about building and a few of his creations. BrickJournal: What do you do outside of building? Djordje Dobrosavljevic: I’m a translator by trade. My interests outside of LEGO also include animation and music and the three usually end up mixing with each other in some way or another! How long have you been building? LEGO’s been in my life in some form or another since I was a very small kid, so I’ve been building practically my whole life! I only really started posting online around 2013 though. What got you into figure building? I’ve always been a fan of LEGO’s action figure lines like Bionicle, so that had a great deal to do with it. I also really enjoy making expressive things that show emotion, and figure builds are the perfect medium for it. Describe your building process—do you sketch a model, or just build it? It depends on the build, really. Sometimes I’ll start with a solid concept in mind, maybe even make a sketch or two of it before I begin. What happens a lot more often, though, is that I’ll pick up a part and start messing with it, trying to see how I could use it in an interesting way. The rest of the build then follows from that. How long does it take to build a model? Again, it depends on the build, but I usually work pretty fast. I try to ride on the back of short bursts of inspiration and not linger on a particular build for too long. Of course, there are exceptions and sometimes I’ll have an unfinished thing sitting in a box for months, waiting for that spark of inspiration to come again. All three of the builds here are essentially my experimenting with metallic parts. I’ve always had a bit of a fascination with them because the parts that come in these colors are usually strange, hard-to-use shapes.
Halgvozd the Purifier in progress.
Djordje Dobrosavljevic:
Building Beasts! Article and Photography by Djorde Dobrosavljevik
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Gorilla Scorpio
Gorilla Scorpio was built for the Marchikoma event on Flickr, where builders come together every March and post creations inspired by the Tachikoma, also known as think tanks, from the Ghost in the Shell series. The designs of the Tachikoma are already pretty organic looking as far as robots go, but I wanted to take it a step further with this build. Taking cues from its namesake animals and various pieces of military equipment, the Gorilla Scorpio was supposed to evoke the look of a jungle fighter robot, both agile and tough. It also takes a good amount of inspiration from Metal Gear Solid 4’s biomechanical designs, namely the Gekko walkers and their synthetic musculature. The part I’m most pleased with is how the eye turned out—it gives the whole thing a creepy, inhuman look. Work in progress. Some views of the completed model.
Community
Amy’s haunted house and grounds.
Building to Heal:
Amy Willis and TherapeuticLUG Article by Joe Meno Photography by Amy Willis
Building with LEGO is different things to different people. For some, it’s a hobby where a person can replicate an environment or object as close to reality as possible. For others, it’s a way to express creativity by building imaginative sculptures or mosaics. For still others, it’s a medium of play, and for a few, it’s a medium of mindfulness. Amy Willis has been building since childhood and now uses it as a mindfulness exercise to express herself when she can’t find the words. One of her recent models of a haunted mansion was part of a therapeutic process to help her communicate her emotions and thoughts related to grief and loss. This began when Amy was in third grade. Her father suffered a heart attack while working building a high school. He was in cardiac arrest and taken to a hospital where he was revived. However, his brain didn’t receive enough oxygen in time, and as a result, while Amy’s father was alive, he was in a reduced mental state. It took five years before he passed away. The trauma from this has affected Amy ever since, with grief and anxieties.
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Her grief was something that cycled in her as she was growing up. Since most other children had not experienced what she had, Amy was in a place that proved to be isolating. She couldn’t communicate her experience and feelings with her classmates, so she felt unheard and
The interior of the haunted house.
misunderstood by them. She felt alone, except for the friends she made with the minifigures she had. Years later, after losing her job, she began building her haunted mansion. With the characters that touch upon death in one manner or another (Frankenstein, zombies, and ghosts), Amy projected her feelings into them from visiting her father at the nursing home. To her, the minifigures were much like her dad—a spirit trapped inside a static body. But as she began to build the mansion, her best friend passed away from cancer. Amy’s loss of her job and her friend triggered her to re-explore her father’s passing, her grief and her suffering. Building the haunted mansion began the process that helped give Amy the time to really accept and embrace all her feelings and emotions relating to death. She began to heal and accept death as part of a process of life. Building gave her the ability to create a world where she could belong, feel loved, and most significantly, feel important and valued for being herself. Building also gave her a means to become more open and connect with others. She enjoyed LEGO building because it gave her an opportunity to safely explore her feelings and thoughts while exerting
The vampire is on the hunt.
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Community
Presenting The Ultimate Skylab Set! Article and Photography by Joseph Chambers I am somewhat ashamed to admit that LEGO’s Apollo Saturn V was the first LEGO set that I had assembled in probably twenty years. I was back in school working on an Electrical Engineering degree and a particularly hard semester made me realize that I needed something to help me decompress from the endless hours of math that I was then experiencing. What better than a scale model of one of my favorite pieces of space history built out of the preferred building toy of my childhood to do that for me? While it delivered the needed catharsis, the experience was over far too quickly, and I almost immediately needed something else to work on. I still had another year of school and you can only do so many differential equations without wanting to Kragle your eyes shut. So, after a little searching I found the very well-made Skylab modification created by Grant Passmore. This small project brought me into the MOC and AFOL world and taught me how to source parts, find communities of like-minded builders, and how to create my own LEGO rocketry designs. And of course, during this time, I also found the amazing Saturn V Launch Umbilical Tower design by Valerie Roche. Joe’s rocket seems poised for launch.
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Let me digress for a moment to talk about Skylab, because of all of the many launch vehicles in history, the Saturn V that launched Skylab is by far my favorite. Skylab occupies this much overlooked corner of NASA history, hidden between the two giants of the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. It was the only major outcome of the Apollo Applications Program, and in itself is a story worth looking into. Skylab was literally built out of a spare Saturn V S-IVB stage. In essence, they simply took an S-IVB, removed the J-2 engine, built a working lab and living quarters inside what was once the liquid hydrogen tank, made the oxygen tank into a septic tank/trash bin, and added an airlock, solar panels, and a solar telescope. The crews would ride to the station in modified Apollo Command and Service modules atop Saturn-1B boosters. America’s first space station was literally built out of the leftovers of the Apollo program. The launch vehicle that put Skylab into orbit, SA-513, was the last Saturn V launched and by far the most unique. Three crews of three men each visited Skylab throughout 1973 and into 1974, with Skylab 4 staying for a record-breaking 84 days. Skylab eventually succumbed to orbital decay and burned up over Western Australia on July 11, 1979. Skylab was a unique experience in the history of space exploration—a resounding success, despite all of the many challenges that were encountered.
Skylab
Some different views of Skylab.
Launch Umbilical Tower (LUT) Pedestal
Digression over; now back to our program. I did not so much decide to build a LUT, it was more that I suddenly found myself collecting parts and those parts just happened to start being joined together in the shape of an LUT. The decision happened in the math-oppressed recesses of my unconscious creative brain. And in a similar fashion, I knew that I would be modifying Valerie’s design to reflect the changes made to the real life LUT #2 for Skylab, I just did not realize that giving myself permission to make modifications to the design would lead to where it did. In the end—seven months and 9,000 pieces
Views of the LUT.
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