Random Little Joe pictures

[Steve Fitton]

Just a few pictures of the Little Joe vehicle in airpower park in Hampton, VA

 

[Steve Fitton]

a few more

 

[JAL3]

Thanks for posting these.

I love Joes, especially the Mercury edition!

 

[gdjsky01]

Very cool!

TRF has heavily compressed them causing some severe JPEG artifacting. Are these available elsewhere at full resolution? Could they be?

Best wishes
Jeff

 

[Initiator001]

It looks like they cleaned up the place since I visited five years ago.

 

[Steve Fitton]

See if these look any better. I can email full resolution if somebody needs that.
And yes, they have cleaned the place up and reopened the museum inside. There are now thousands of scale plastic models inside among other things.

 

[hcmbanjo]

Thanks for posting these.
They are going into a file for my (one day) Naram scale entry!

 

[GuyNoir]

Somehow I can't escape thinking that they moved this bird from Wallops, since the LJ 1 that was at the Wallops Visitor Center is no longer there.

 

[billspad]

Somehow I can't escape thinking that they moved this bird from Wallops, since the LJ 1 that was at the Wallops Visitor Center is no longer there.

I don't think so. The capsule in Hampton is definitely not the one that was at Wallops. The Wallops capsule was a a mock up of a production capsule and not a very good one. The one in Hampton is a real prototype capsule and I'm pretty sure it was flown as LJ2.


Somewhere I have pictures of the Hampton and Wallops Little Joes that wre taken around the same time so there are two of them. Neither of the boosters are real. All that were built were flown. The easiest way to tell is to look at the rivets. The real ones have a lot more.

 

[Steve Fitton]

Thanks for the tip about the boosters being mockups. Are the display ones ground support checkout vehicles or something along those lines?

 

[billspad]

Thanks for the tip about the boosters being mockups. Are the display ones ground support checkout vehicles or something along those lines?

From what I've read I believe they were not. The Little Joe was a fast track project. The vehicles were produced and flown in a relatively short time. I've got all the information in a file cabinet but it's currently buried behind a bunch of rockets while my office gets repainted. Someday I'm going to get around to making a really nice model with all the data I collected. In the mean time, if you need something in particular I can probably dig it out.