As the Artemis II crew enters its seventh day in space, a museum in Dawson Creek is offering a special exhibit commemorating the groundbreaking mission.
The ScapeModel Museum showcases decades of space exploration through precisely engineered models.
Founder Nick Proach says the collection represents a lifetime of work, featuring space models tied to real missions, along with artifacts that have travelled beyond the atmosphere.
The new Artemis exhibit features accurate representations of the rocket and spacecraft built for the mission.
Visitors can explore the mission and its impact through visual displays and insight from Proach, who has built a career crafting space models for organizations around the world.
“I’ve worked for various aerospace companies. I’ve also worked for museums worldwide, private collectors and NASA,” he said, adding that his company did all of the space models for SpaceX from 2008 to 2020.
That passion for space exploration is something Proach has spent a lifetime building.
Proach’s interest for space exploration began at seven years old, inspired by the first two American astronauts, Alan Shepard and John Glenn.
He closely followed the Apollo program from 1968 to 1977, including the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing.
“My clearest memories as a kid are with the Apollo program, because I followed Apollo right from the very beginning,” he said.
In 1971, Proach designed a small model of the lunar rover ahead of the Apollo 15 mission and sent it to CTV News, hoping it would be used in coverage.
At first, Proach said the network did not seem too interested, but he ended up receiving a call that launched his career.
“I heard back from CTV the week before the launch of Apollo 15, in July of 1971. They asked me to do the entire landing site. We had the lunar module and the actual land with the rover,” he said.
After treating model making as a hobby for the next few years, Proach started his business by placing an ad in a magazine. His first large contract was with a space museum in the United States, where he designed more than 100 models. After that, he “never looked back.”
Now, that lifelong passion is on display in Proach’s museum, where visitors can learn about many missions, including Apollo, SpaceX and more.
Unique items are also displayed throughout the exhibit, such as a special SpaceX patch that has flown in space.
The Artemis II mission is on its way back from the moon, and its crew has broken a record for the furthest distance travelled from earth. It also marks the first lunar expedition in more than five decades.
Proach says he wonders why it took so long to return to the moon again, noting space programs in the United States are often shaped by the government in power.
He adds NASA mainly focused on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station programs in the early 2000s, both of which helped make Artemis possible.
Proach says he hopes the Artemis II mission will inspire the next generation of young Canadian scientists, engineers and dreamers, the same way the Apollo program inspired him.
“To hear the public ask questions and show interest, it’s great because there’s so much of this story people don’t know about. It really opens their world,” he said.
The SpaceModel Museum is opened Tuesday to Thursday from noon to 4 p.m., or by appointment through its Facebook page. It is located in the old Aspol Ford building at 1125 – 102nd Avenue downtown Dawson Creek.