My 6yo has been asking for ‘Rocket’ projects (ever since he saw Tintin’s Moon adventure story), for a while now and we’ve staved it off with rockets like these

Not that he didn’t enjoy them, he made one for his friend too.

But this weekend he wanted a space shuttle and he wanted it bad! He bugged his grandpa to lookup on the internet and surprise surprise, grandpa (my Dad) found this (PDF). 

Well, he was very excited and up early on Saturday morning, couldn’t wait for me to be done with my sleep, woke me up and chased me off to get the correct paper! Turns out you have the exact specs for the paper required, but here all I could ask for was ‘stiff A4 size sheet’ and I was given what the stationary shop refers to as ‘Drawing Sheet’. Well, with 10 drawing sheets we started our adventure.

The actual design was 5 pages long, we printed it out at home and the fun started. It took me and almost the whole of Saturday afternoon to cut up all the pieces and start with the work. It took me a major part of the evening to get the fuselage done. Later in the evening Praji took over the wings while I glued up the engine parts.

Finally on Sunday morning I was able finish everything off and we had our space shuttle Moonraker ready!

This is the most breathtaking piece of craftwork I have done in a very very very long time and it reminded me of how much I loved craft when I was a kid.

Thank you http://axmpaperspacescalemodels.com. There are plenty of free models to download and build. If you have a kid half interested in rockets and spaceships, you MUST go there and try out some of the models. It costed a grand total of Rs. 5/- (INR) ($0.10) for the paper and some for the ink on your printer and provided nearly 8 hours of entertainment for the whole family!!! For folks in US, you can build the International Space Station (for crying out loud) for $25, just that it might take a couple of weekends if not more .

Hopefully next week we can build another one. If we succeed, you’ll surely hear from me!!!