Since Krista and I drove to Omaha for the 2017 IPMS/USA National Convention, we stopped along the way in Oklahoma City to eat at Coney Island, see the beautiful Chihuly glass at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and tour the very moving Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum. We also spent some time at the Kansas Cosmosphere (where we ran into David Carlton and his wife, Celeste) before driving through some raging thunderstorms to get to Omaha. We joined the other space modelers for our annual informal gathering. This year it was at the Liquid Sunshine Taproom on Wednesday evening. It's always terrific to see everyone each year. We spent the next evening nosing around the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum after a nice BBQ dinner.
Rob Schorry hosted the Modeling Real Space seminar this year. He and Kevin Kilkenny talked about building their models of the New Horizons probe. My new camera has video capability, so I recorded it for posterity (until the big EMP takes out all the data). click here for the 720x576 video (632 MB).
Jay Chladek hosted the following seminar. talking about Soviet space stations, based on his book "Outposts on the Frontier." Again, I recorded his talk and it's available here (720x576 521 MB MP4 video file).
In the contest room the Real Space categories were filled with some terrific models, as usual. The treat was seeing Ben Guenther's scratchbuilt Nova-Apollo direct ascent lunar landing concept vehicle that took first place in the Hypothetical category and the Best Space and Sci-Fi Vehicle award. Most of the time, it was displayed taken apart so that you could see the incredible engine details. It also looked really cool stacked together, but I didn't have my camera with me when it was shown that way. David Carlton won first place in the Real Space category with his A3 Rocket Deconstructed model. There was also a lot of really impressively lit models in the Sci-Fi section, but my photos don't show the lighting effects well at all. Next time, I'll try shooting video in the contest room along with the stills.
I hope to get to next year's show in Phoenix, AZ, and Chattanooga will be the host site for the 2019 convention. Start making those plans!
As before, I've limited the number of thumbnail images per gallery to 100. The photos are sort of in the order in which I shot them. I tended to jump around a bit to avoid other photographers and others admiring the models, so the order gets a bit jumbled after the initial Real Space entries. I intended to shoot everything in the room, but I faded after a couple of hours: my back was barking and by that time a lot of the models were starting to blur together. Oh well, lesson learned: don't try to shoot everything in one day!
You can access a photo through its thumbnail on each gallery page or you can page through the photos, since they're all chained together.