I have always been inspired by the early Space program, when in the 1960's both NASA and the USSR were literally inventing how to put a man safely into space and return him home. For the USA the manned space program began with Project Mercury, where a total of seven astronauts were selected to be the first Americans into space and to then orbit the earth.

In total there were six manned Mercury launches, the first two flights Freedom 7 and Liberty 7 were short 15min sub-orbital flights utilsing a converted Redstone missile. The remaining four flights used the more powerful Atlas booster to take the Mercury capsules into Earth orbit.

Horizon Models provides everything you need to model any of the Mercury missions (including the un-manned test flights) and as I wanted to build both the Redstone and Atlas kits I decided to depict the very first (Freedom 7) and last (Faith 7) missions. These are lovely kits to work with and in 1:72 scale build into excellent additions to any real-space model collection.

You can find my full build report of these two excellent kits here