Around a metre long this impressive kit takes some building but truly does justice to a stunning concept plane that sadly never made it past 2 prototypes – one of which was tragically lost in a mid-air collision with a Starfighter.

The kit is definitely worth the effort, but the fit can only be described as atrocious, with raised panel lines and pretty muffled detail. It take a lot of sanding and filling but I’ve done several of these with the wheels down – so it was nice to do it here with wheels up and the wings dropped. In the video you see it with the wheels down – but these always look wrong to me because of the silver tyres. Apparently they found the rubber tyres kept bursting because of the heat built up in the fuselage during flight, so they had to add metal to the compound to make them more durable.

Apologies for the photography – the model is too big for my setup but I did my best. For the eagle eyed amongst you – there are a couple of inaccuracies.

1. It’s missing the pitot tube on the nose because I was sending it to the USA and I forgot I had removed it.

2. The pint glass was not an original part of the NASA spec as far as I know…