In the year 1987, at the John F. Kennedy Space Center, NASA launched the last of America's deep space probes. The payload, perched on the nose cone of the massive rocket, was a one-man exploration vessel - Ranger 3. Aboard this compact starship, a lone astronaut - Captain William "Buck" Rogers - was to experience cosmic forces beyond all comprehension. An awesome brush with death: in the blink of an eye, his life support systems were frozen by temperatures beyond imagination. Ranger 3 was blown out of its planned trajectory into an orbit a thousand times more vast, an orbit which was to return the ship full circle to his point of origin - its mother Earth - not in five months, but in 38,000 years.
I was born in the late 1970s, around about the time that the world got gripped by science fiction. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers became fixtures of Christmas and Saturday afternoon programming and indelibly etched into my brain.
I don't know what sparked the idea to bring Buck Rogers into the 41st Millenium. I know I chatted about it with cheetor and Curis as part of the 'Choose Your Own Adventurers' project last year. I know I spent several weeks searching on eBay for a Corgi diecast starfighter to adapt. I know I earmarked the pilot from the Rogue Trader adventurers range for the project!