Customer Reviews

Academy Space Shuttle and Booster Rockets

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Not a terrible kit for a child's first plastic model kit, but definitely not a good one. It says "Snap Tite Kit" on the box top, but the instructions indicate glue on all five steps, and it is required or it will just fall apart. It's not well detailed at all, and it has eight parts that are not on the instructions nor are they necessary. They don't even seem to be part of this kit. Also, if left unpainted, the booster rockets (all three are molded into just two pieces) are a cream color and the shuttle is white and black.

This is a reissue of an old kit that Revell sold in the late 1970s/early 1980s. It's frankly pretty crude, with few details. Some details are wrong (e.g. the retro-rockets in the SRB nosecones) and the suggested paint and decal schemes are completely spurious.

For kids making a first model, it may be a fun simple (and cheap) project. For more serious hobby modellers, it can be improved with kitbashing and some effort to match real-world marking schemes, assuming that you have a specific need for a 1/288 scale stack. Otherwise try Hasegawa's 1/200 shuttle stack kit instead (although it's more expensive).

This model is advertised as "Snap Tite" on Amazon. This usually means that no glue is required and sometimes the model is pre-painted. Neither is true for this model. It looks terrible out of the box and I'm not going to let my four-year-old loose with toxic model paints and cement. While many of the connection points have stayed together adequately without glue, several key ones do not; for example, the booster rockets slide down over pegs in the lauchpad, causing a gap between the parts. It is obvious that some of the connection points were not designed to snap together at all. The instructions are not in English, which wouldn't bother me too much, but they aren't that good either. The price was good, but in this case, you really do get what you pay for.

For those who are picky about these things (and this should have been a red flag for me), Snap Tite is a registered trademark of Revell, not Academy.

This model was really easy to put together. My husband helped my 6yo do it. It was a little cheap looking, but it was really inexpensive so I didn't feel cheated. We used a dry erase marker over the seams on the shuttle and then wiped of the surface so the inside were darker. That made the shuttle look very realistic. My husband went over to the elctronics store and bought some small LED lights to put through the 4 holes on the corners of the platform and and now it looks just like a real shuttle on the launchpad waiting for lift off.

received in good condition, an excellent show and tell display for grade school children