Have always wanted to build a rocket from the drawings in the Spaceship Handbook.

This is the Athena, from the G. Harry Stine short story "The Day the Rocket Crashed" published in August 1953 in the Saturday Evening Post.

I used the Athena drawing in the book to scale my RC RG version. It is BT-80 sized with 6mm Depron flying surfaces, designed to use the RMS-RC E6 reload.

As the custom printed cone a friend was making was running very late, I did a substitute cone for now, based on a modified PNC-80B, with a thin sheet styrene "hat" and a hard balsa tip. Good enough to fly with for now. The scale worked out so that the wingtip and tail tip pods were exactly BT-5 size. Wingspan is 22" and the model is about 32" long

Did my own markings on a Silhoutte Cameo craft cutter. The canopy is a small balsa wood carving covered with Super Monokote.

Was a fun build and I think it ought to be a very nice flyer with the generous wing area. Hope to maiden in in the next couple of weeks.

The various rockets from G. Harry Stine's stories were fairly large. The Athena as designed (as interpreted by Jon Rogers) was 136 feet long. The Fafnir was 303 feet long and the Absyrtis was 197 feet long. The BT-80 Athena works out to 1/46.15 scale.

The other pic shows the Athena with my newly completed Coaster Dynasoar Centauri and my newly completed Dynasoar Aerospace Avro Vulcan.

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Tom Blakeney
NAR 52002 L1
AMA 28682
TRA 2150 (lapsed)