Hi All! I have read through all the posts in this thread and I must say, this is quite an interesting bunch of people! I, too, grew up in the Space Age and remember when Apollo landed on the Moon in July of 1969. I remember Apollo 13, 17, ASTP, the first shuttle launch etc.....
I am also an astronomer and someone who works and studies in the aerospace fields. Like many, my interest in my chosen career path was piqued as a young child with the Mercury and Gemini programs, etc. Aside from the modelling world - of which I built almost every space model available up until my life took me away from model building 28 years ago - the question of what happened with space exploration is a vast and deep one. There is no single answer, no magic answer as to why our collective interest in it died off to the point of almost non-existence.
For one thing, back then we had real Heroes. Today, we have none. Kids today don't idolize people like we did when we were younger. They are more interested in instant graitification than spending time doing anything and - especially - learning something. Model building was more than just slapping glue, paint and decals on plastic. You could not help but to learn about history as a model builder. The more you built, the more you learned. It was a multi-faceted hobby as it taught history, it taught patience, it taugh skill with your hands and it provided fuel for your imagination. Kids today are not interested in this. They want their X-boxes and rapid fire two-second soundbyte world. The world us middle aged (and older) people knew is gone - at least as we once knew it anyway.
It's funny, though, how things in Life happen. As I said, I have not built a model in 28 years. It's not that I didn't want to, it's just that Life had other plans for me and there was no time left for such activities. But, three years ago I met a woman who has since become my wife. What is incredibly interesting to me is that she is 9 years younger than I am (I'm 45) - and had absolutely no clue what the Apollo program was! She had vaguely heard of it but didn't know anything about it. She had never heard of Gemini or Mercury and really had not much background on the Space Shuttle either.
However, she had an interest in all of it - joined the local astronomy club and even went to graduate school in space studies. From my perspective it has been an interesting trip, as I can relate most of this stuff first hand to her. I was there. I remember it. I was a part of that history and a part of that dream that people from her age bracket have no clue existed! It is so very strange the differences, in this respect, that a mere 9 years made!
However, to make a rather long story short, as she got more involved and interested in this subject area, I began looking at all my old modelling supplies. We ended up buying several models from Ebay - Apollo CSM, Lunar Module, Vostok, Apollo-Soyuz Test Project and, more recently, some of the very origins of the Space Race itself - the German V-1 and V-2 (or A-4, depending on how you look at it) rockets. My wife now knows what these are, what they looked like, where they came from and what they caused in the future which is now our history.
While most of us old time modellers know how one thing always leads to another, my wife is discovering more history than she ever knew existed. Right now she's learning about the old Nike missile systems that used to guard some of our major cities. We've been able to locate and construct the old Revell Nike-Hercules kit and the old Renwal Nike-Ajax kit.
Even more interesting, though, is that she never knew 12 of the Nike bases existed in the city we live in. What's surprising is that several of them are still there, abandoned and empty for the past 33 years - but still standing. We've begun going around and surveying the sites, taking pictures and actually walking through them. Building the models is a great way to learn - but nothing compares to actually experiencing the real things/places behind the models.
It's been an interesting trip back into the modelling world :)
-Ro