Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean with Nick Proach

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean with Nick Proach, who is holding the actual hammer used by Al 35 years ago on the surface of the moon at the Ocean of Storms.
"To think I was holding something that was exposed to the lunar environment.
That's how close I've been to the moon.".. Nick Proach

Pad 34, Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This is the pad where Apollo 1 and its 3-man crew, Astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee would have launched from February 20, 1967. They were killed in a spacecraft fire January 27th, 1967, 3 weeks before their scheduled flight.
I was there for private 30th anniversary memorial ceremonies January 27, 1997.

I was fortunate enough to get back to Pad 34 on last time before I came back home from the Kennedy Space Center in January, 1997. It was Apollo 7 which was launched from this pad in October, 1968, and was the last manned mission to be launched from this complex.
Today it is a US National Heritage site, with the words "Abandon in Place" can be seen just to the left of where I am standing. It almost looks like is says "Abandon in Peace".

Proach Models was commissioned to build a 1/100 scale Saturn 1B and 1/32 scale Apollo spacecraft to commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the Apollo 1 accident, where Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee lost their lives in a spacecraft fire on January 27th, 1967.

The model is seen here at Pad 34, below where the real Saturn 1B was poised ready for lift-off 30 years earlier, at the time of the accident. Here the model proudly stands, with a gentle wind blowing in off the Atlantic, on January 27, 1997, during a private memorial ceremony for the 3 astronauts of Apollo 1.

Today the model is on display at the Astronaut Memorial Foundation at the Kennedy Space Center.

Nick Proach standing beside a real Saturn 5 F-1 engine, on display at the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center.
Altogether 5 of these engines powered the Saturn V during lift-off, generating over 7.6 million pounds of thrust.

I met an old friend.....CBC Newsworld's Henry Champ...during the launch of STS-95, October 28, 1998.
I first met Henry during the Apollo 15 mission in July of 1971.

He was with CTV at the time, covering the mission with CTV anchorman Harvey Kirk. I made the entire Apollo 15 landing site, featuring the LM, rover and ALSEP Experiments, in 1/48 scale. Harvey and Henry used the model in CTV's coverage of the Apollo 15 mission. It's what started me on the road to aerospace modelmaking!

Stopping in to visit CNN's Myles O'Brien with his special guest Walter Cronkite during the coverage of STS-95, October 1998. Proach Models furnished CNN with a number of models to use during their coverage of the launch.

Just a few hours before the launch of STS-95, I met another Canadian... astronaut Julie Payette.
Julie went on to fly the STS-96 mission in May of 1999.

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