Came here to say this: I bought one of these (same color w/o the body work) in 1991 for my wife. It looked pretty good, was not slow, and was fairly well finished and put together. The paint quality and lack of orange peel was a significant cut above the US standard of that time. It was reasonably priced. Generally,…

I should add, that these astronauts had a GREAT ticker-tape parade in Chicago, probably one of the last ever (newer skyscraper windows don’t open, and ticker tape was on it’s way out). I kid you not, the sky was black with it. It was an incredible sight, maybe 1/10 of the population of Chicago came out for it.

When that was first installed there (one of the great museums of the world, IMO), you could actually touch it (I did), but some jerks had already taken a few hunks off of it and that was probably the end of that.

I saw a documentary on this mission; the schedule was very tight and sped-up because of the Kennedy deadline. and they lost a lot of time with the Apollo 1 accident. I think that the mission controller told one of the wives that chances of success were 50-50.