NASA Tracking Vehicle #01-00-54 in Box

Good grief, I believe I am finally to the point where nearly all my old photos have been edited to where they're usable here on the blog. The recently completed "Small World" series started, in part, as a way to post photos that have been sitting on my hard drive for what seems millennia. After perusing my files, I found a bunch more unedited photos. Case in point: this Matchbox NASA tracking Vehicle. Way back in 2015 I posted the #014 NASA Tracking Vehicle on blister card and had actually taken photos of today's toy a year earlier in 2014! The photos sat on the hard drive until just the other day when I got around to editing them!

Okay, fine. So leave us take a look at this nifty little NASA support vehicle from Matchbox. The toy apparently was a conversion by Matchbox from an earlier mobile home piece and it makes sense to have used that to cobble this together because in real life, a mobile home would have been spacious enough for equipment and crew. I tried looking up mobile tracking stations on Google and got bubkis, so either this is a fantasy piece or NASA is not releasing photos of this hardware. That being said, even if NASA didn't have gear like this, the various news outlets certainly did and would enable them to file news reports from remote locations. For now though let's just concentrate on the toy. It has a rotating radar dish (not motorized) on the roof and an operating door on one side which is activated by a red lever below the frame. The graphics are in blue on a white body and, like other Matchbox toys, would be 1/64 scale. Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Here the tracking vehicle is staged alongside a Hardee's Apollo 13 pog collector case (blogged in 2015)

Door closed

Door opened