Aerospace Home

Hillsboro Airplane Home

There is a guy here who is trying to make a home out of an old jetliner. It's an unusual project, shoot, it might even be unique. I think it's a fine idea, for him. Has very limited appeal to me. I imagine running out of headroom every time I turn around, or whenever I try to pass someone else going the other way. But maybe there is more room than I imagine. I mean, if you aren't using it as airliner, you can rip out all the seats,  the overhead luggage compartments and the ceiling, and if you do all that you might have standing headroom all the way to the edge of the floor. I mean the thing is twelve feet in diameter. That's pretty big.
     It reminds of an idea I was kicking around a while back. One of the big attractions of science fiction is really cool space ships. Another is adventures on alien planets. Not too alien though, we want to explore alien planets where we might possibly be able to live. In case you haven't noticed, Earth has some really alien environments, some might even call them hostile. Bone dry deserts, frozen wastelands, steaming jungles, fetid swamps, you name it, we've got it. So I got the idea of building a house in the shape of a spaceship. With some creative engineering and attention to detail, you could create something that looks like it just landed from outer space and was fully inhabitable. It need not be expensive, at least not like a real rocketship because it wouldn't be going anywhere. You could make it out of cheap, heavy materials like steel and concrete. You would have to pay attention to the fit and finish if you wanted to make it look real, but we have armies of artists who specialize in that kind of thing.

Seems like in the dawn of the space age, every Science Fiction magazine had a picture of a giant rocket on the cover. It would be perched on its tail, which always had three equally space fins, having just landed on an alien planet. I went looking for pictures, but I only found a couple. The one on the left shows how I would imagine how your rocketship would look when you got home after work, except the background would be spectacular vistas of mesas and mountians in the great Southwestern Desert. The one of the right with the cutaway of the interior illustrates how the interior could be laid out.

Jetliner home via Scott.

Update October 2020 replaced missing image.