Scale: 1/144
Source: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

My favorite book series of all time is the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. In the first book, a team of 100 scientists, cosmonauts, euronauts and astronauts travel to Mars on the "enormous" spacecraft Aries. It is described as looking like it was "made from a childrens toy set, in which cylinders were attached at their ends to create more complex shapes". It is also mentioned there are over 500 rooms aboard. The ship spins to create .38 G, which is roughly what the crew can expect once on Mars. Also, the nose is covered with instrumentation.

At first I thought I would build the Aries from scratch using only the written description, my imagination and maybe the cover art on some editions. However, I began thinking that the Soviet Union had held hopes for visiting the Red Planet since the 1960's. Searching through Mark Wade's Encyclopedia Astronautica, I found that in 1989 the Kurchatov Institute had proposed a design for a 150 meter long, multi-module manned Mars spacecraft. It fit so many of the descriptions in the book that I decided to use the encyclopedia description as the basis of my model, to be built in 1/144 scale.

The Model

The model is 100% scratchbuilt using pipe, card, tinfoil, wire,chocolate wrappers, Christmas decorations, ping pong balls, putty, spare parts, paint and glue. The stand is varnished pine with "CCCP 1989 Kurchatov Mars" emblazoned on it. It currently resides in the Jack R. Hunt Memorial Library.