The Eagle transporter is the workhorse of Moonbase Alpha in the early 1970s ITV series Space 1999. There is a crew of two - a pilot and co-pilot/flight engineer. The central unit can carry a mission crew in relative comfort along with a decent amount of equipment, or it could be swapped out for specialist equipment modules. Part of the Eagles' tasks was to shift nuclear waste from Moonbase Alpha to a dunpsite on the Lunar Farside. It was while transporting such a load that an Eagle crashed causing a chain reaction explosion that somehow ripped the moon out of its orbit into an extrasytemic journey that would see the moon and its sometimes unwilling inhabitants visit a large number of solar systems during the show's two season run.
The photograph shows a kit model Eagle from Airfix superimposed over a shot of the lunar surface. The Eagle was a reasonably decent all-plastic model to assemble with little in the way of reconstructive work in order to get everything to fit. Although the undercarriage on the studio Eagles was sprung, the ones supplied with this kit are fixed, and if I wasn't worried about wrecking the model, converting them to have some spring would be a project I would like to undertake. Unfortunately, these kits are even rarer than the proverbial hen's teeth <G>
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