T is "To Boldly Go . . . "

. . . forth! 2022? It too will pass!

Did I say we'd be looking at something from Kazakhstan in the future? Well, it's a year in the future now, so by Jove; let's look at it! First though, do you remember when I got a little excited about a Merit infant-toy stackable fort/palace thing?

Well, this is even better, and, looking at the images in that old post, I recon the parts will be interchangeable, if I ever get the urge to fire masonry towers or tiled-turrets into deep space!

Jovians queue-up to board their space rocket courtesy of a brand I don't recognise, but it looks like ЈПЕ as a pyramid/in a triangle, indeed it's might be ЗЦГ with the point of the triangle at the bottom? I should have photographed it but . . . red plastic, winter light, flash!

The colours of the rocket, or at least; the red and turquoise could be seen as the colours of the flag of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, so while the factory may have been considered 'Soviet Russian', I suspect it was local to the now independent Kazakhstan?

The component parts, a mid-density (soft) polyethylene plastic with the wooden 'wand'! The base-plate (bottom right, red) and the top cap/cone (white, top left) are slightly tighter fits than the other parts, so that once you have finished building it, it all stays together so it can be flown about by hand!

While the Merit castle had fixed spigots top and bottom of hollow tubes, this rocket has a central core of a wooden rod or dowel - I don't know how long a dowel has to be to become a rod!

I done did a little .gif

A quick point - in hours, this was less than six days, Kazakhstan to UK . . . over Christmas! I have to wait at least two weeks to get something from New York, New Jersey or New Hampshire, at the best of times and they are direct to Heathrow, several times a day, while it's up to three weeks from Italy or Greece? Mexico? Over two months! Heathrow-sorting to Fleet sorting . . . 40-minute van-drive, Fleet sorting to my door, 3/4-minute walk. yet this, from a  late-night purchase to a 9am delivery was a few hours over the five days? I think the words we're looking for are 'quality service', from the Kazak postal services! Something ours - in the West - have lost, abandoned.

Kazakhstan is building closer economic ties with the EU (without showing a similar interest in Joining NATO) and will be watching the Ukrainian border with some alarm, Russia has no right to enslave all these neighbours, just because she had once done so, and I hope common-sense prevails . . . or Putin meets a sticky-end.

While it clearly has an order of construction (left) to make a pretty standard space rocket of the pulp book-cover variety, the components can - of course - be assembled in numerous ways, which may or may not look good, fashionable or just plain silly!

New 'best toy ever'?